NORWICH: 3rd Year Celebration with Rob Hopkins - 15 November

An evening for Transition Norwich and the City of Norwich to celebrate, reconnect, remind, regenerate, share and discuss where we are and what we have achieved since the 'great unleashing' back in 2008.

The evening is set for Tuesday the 15th of November- 7.30pm at the United Reform Church (Princes Street). The plan is to have a happy and relaxed celebration, an opportunity for further dreaming and planning, with stalls to display the various projects throughout Norwich that have been a direct result of TN or link directly with TN in their ethos and vision.

Rob Hopkins will be joining our celebration, sharing the broader story of transition as he witnesses it as well as discussing his upcoming book The Transition Companion (including sections about the TN blog, Norwich FarmShare and a great pic of the NR3 Reskillers by helenofnorwich).

Plus.... there are plans to put a short 10 min film together that reflects on Transition Norwich, the place, the people, the projects.For inquiries about the event please contact Christine Way at training@transitionnorwich.org

The Transition Companion by Rob Hopkins (Green Books) was published on 27 October and had its launch in London on 12 October.

NORWICH; Magdalen Street Celebration - 1 October

On Saturday October 1st, Magdalen Street will celebrate its unique character in street festival style with performances, exhibitions, fashion shows, workshops, family activities and local history tours.

Following on last year's memorable and groundbreaking success, even more musicians and activities have been arranged.

Norwich Taiko Centre will be opening the event under the Magdalen flyover and some of the best-known bands in the city will be playing on the street throughout the day, using a cycle-powered PA. The audience will be able to hop on the bike and power up their favourite bands!

Helen Simpson-Slapp of the organising committee said “The goal of the day is to bring together neighbourhood residents, regulars and visitors to highlight Magdalen Street's role as a hub of creative, independently-owned, ethnically diverse and environmentally sustainable businesses. ”

The art events, stallholders and historical aspects to the day will bring to life Magdalen Street's rich heritage. The street still boasts a range of food, clothes and shoe shops and is classified by the City Council as the busiest in the whole of Norwich for numbers of pedestrians and buses. Some of the shops from 1905 have survived - most notably 2 of the original fish shops.

The Magdalen Street Celebration themes for 2011 are Creativity, Diversity and Sustainability. Known informally as the 'Creative Quarter', the area houses a multitude of creative businesses. 'Diversity' refers to the street’s ethnic diversity as well as the range of disability-related charities operating in the area and 'Sustainability' is represented by the plethora of second-hand, vintage, antique and craft shops in the area.

The event is spearheaded by members of Transition Norwich seeking a fun way to engage community, celebrate the range of cultural backgrounds represented and promote the opportunity to live more sustainably by shopping locally, buying second-hand and making friends locally. Transition Norwich is a community-based response to peak oil, climate change and economic recession. The organisers are grateful for the financial assistance of Norwich City Council and Norfolk County Council who are supporting this year's event. Chris Hull

TO GET INVOLVED: Helen Simpson-Slapp helenofnorwich@hotmail.com Tel: 07747 751656 Stefi Barna Tel: 07964 494836 Next meeting: Aladdin's Cafe, Magdalen Street. Tuesday 6th September, 7pm Web: magdalenstreet.blogspot.com or join our Facebook page

NORWICH: Introducing Kitchen Conversations - Low Carbon Cookbook - 24 August

Last month the Low Carbon Cookbook project met, as usual, for delicious supper of shared dishes (from rainbow summer slaws to foraged cherry plum pie) and afterwards discussed the Burning Issues embedded in the present industrialised food system. We looked at the scarcity of water, the destructiveness of supermarkets, peak phosphates, and how we can change the menu, both practically and philosophically, in our daily lives and neighbourhoods.

We also decided to open out these monthly discussions and invite everyone to take part in a conversation over supper on all aspects of food and carbon reduction.

Our first Kitchen Conversation will be on Eating Local for Real on Wednesday 24 August at 6.30pm at Jo Balfe's new cafe The Nectar at 16 Onley Street, just off the Unthank Road. Jo is a member of the TN Permaculture group and gives regular workshops on cooking and eating local and raw food. We'll bring our own local low carbon dishes to share and Jo will be offering drinks and pedal-powered desserts.

We'll be holding our second Low Carbon Kitchen Conversation at Norwich FoodCycle Cafe in September. These free community meals are cooked up each week at the Friends Meeting House kitchens from food that would otherwise be thrown away, donated by local shops, restaurants and market stalls (including surplus veg from Norwich FarmShare).

Everyone is welcome at both events. Details and times will be added soon to the calendar. Watch this space! Charlotte Du Cann

Bicycle blender outside The Nectar; Low Carbon Cookbook Crew; blight-free organic potatoes at The Spuds Don't Work anti-GM rally outside the Forum

Kitchen Conversation 1: Eating Local for Real at The Nectar Cafe, 16 Onley Street. KC 2: Food and Waste will be at FoodCycle, Friends Meeting House, Upper Goat Lane in September. For more details contact Charlotte Du Cann rootshootsandseeds@hotmail.co.uk

Norwich FarmShare - Open Day - 11 June

It's Open Day down on the farm at Postwick on Saturday 11 June! Join us on the farm for a family day out. Bring a picnic to share!

We’ll be offering tours of the farm, introducing you to all the crops we’re growing and showing you the wildlife that shares our site. We’llh ave an opportunity for anyone who wishes to join in with the work onthe farm for an hour or so, and lots of fun activities for children. We’re also looking forward to a chance to share with you all the plans we have for the future. Absolutely everyone is welcome on the day: we hope to make it a real celebration of everything we’ve achieved so far. Please bring your friends and families along, the more the merrier. There will be lots of FarmShare members on hand to answer any questions you have and a chance to sign up if you haven’t yet.

Additionally, existing members are invited to join us a little earlier on the day at 12.00 for our Quarterly General Meeting. This will take only half an hour and is a great chance to catch up with what’shappening and take part in the decisions we make about the farms. As always, please contact us if you have any questions. Laura Creen

For latest Norwich FarmShare update click here.

Photo: Field of Dreams by Elena Judd

Norwich - Zero Carbon Concert - 27 November

Climate campaigners have organised a zero carbon world concert on the eve of the next UN climate summit to demonstrate that a zero carbon world is both achievable and fun. The concert will consist of a number of events all over the world – in England, Wales, Holland, Italy, Poland, Sierra Leone, China, Australia and the USA.

The summit begins on 29 November and there will be an event in Norwich on 27 November featuring Vic Salter, Pedalo, Ruth Gordon and Jimmy and the Magic Shoe in the St Thomas Church Hall, Earlham Rd. It will be acoustic so that it causes no carbon dioxide emissions. In addition, people will be encouraged to travel to the event without emitting carbon. They are asked to walk, cycle, or use public transport instead of driving – unless they have an electric car powered by green electricity, or a diesel vehicle using waste vegetable oil. Also, the venue will be unheated - we've asked them to turn off the gas central heating - so dress accordingly!

N.B. Norwich Critical Mass Bike Ride is on Friday 26th, NOT Saturday 27th as stated in error on some Zero Carbon Concert posters. Concert organisers apologise for this error.

Tickets are £2 in advance or £3 on the door. You can have a look at the website for the zero carbon world concert for a zero carbon world at http://www.zerocarbonconcert.org/

Norwich: Introduction to Permaculture Gardening Workshop - 10 July

Come and find out what Permaculture Gardening is all about. These informal workshops will cover the 12 Permaculture Design Principles, how to apply these in your own gardens to create edible, biodiverse and beautiful spaces, including using ponds, discovering Mulch (and why mulching matters!), companion planting, herb spirals, keyhole beds and composting. Also a session on Forest Gardening, layering and Perennial crops. and Permaculture gardeners question time!

The introductory workshop will be held at the Grow Your Own shed at Bluebell Allotments (South), from 10-4 on Saturday 10th July. Please bring something to share for lunch, hot drinks provided. £10 donation to cover costs. 10-12 participants. (Brenna Powys/Food & Farming)

To book a place please contact Mahesh Pant at sustainable@talktalk.net tel:01603 455868 www.grow-our-own.co.uk

Seedling Swaps in May - Bungay, Norwich and Wivenhoe

Seedling Swaps are the happening event this Spring! This Saturday (May 15) there will be tables overflowing with small salad and vegetables plants all over Transition East Anglia. Transition Wivenhoe will be flourishing at the local Farmer's Market and Transition Norwich (see poster) on show at the Norwich Playhouse bar terrace.

Writes TN's allotment holder, Jane Chittenden: "Growing more of our own food is a great way to start designing a better future. Very environmentally friendly, doesn't require fossil fuel and kind to our pockets too! So we're having a plant swap, where we’ll have seedling plants (tomatoes and other veggies plus herbs and flowers too) and we invite people to bring along their own plants to swap. If you haven't got anything to swap for our plants, a donation would be much appreciated. Do come along with your plants - organic for preference, labelled and with advice on growing tips if possible!"

Sustainable Bungay’s lively Give and Grow seedling and plant swap was held in Bungay library courtyard on May 2. SB's Mark Watson reports: "The place was transformed inside and out with a constant lively buzz as people gathered, swapped plants and talked about everything from beekeeping to heritage bean varieties - in spite of the rain and the cold. We'd all been patiently (very patiently this year) growing our seeds for allotment and garden in homemade newspaper pots, toilet rolls and even ordinary pots. The tables were laden with vibrant healthy lettuces, currants of all colours, tree saplings, cosmos, mints, aloe vera, grasses, lemon balm, foxgloves, snowdrop bulbs, wild flower seeds, seed potatoes, cucumbers, the list goes on. And you had to be pretty quick as plants swapped hands even before they got on the tables. Especially the sturdy tomatoes which several people said they'd been having difficulty growing so far."

Time to get our hands in the earth!

Seedling Swaps on Saturday 15 May: Transition Norwich Playhouse Bar terrace, St George's St. 11am - 3pm. For more info contact info@transitionnorwich.org.

Transition Wivenhoe @ Farmers' Market, 9am-12noon @ Congregational Hall. 9am-3pm. Contact Julia (826015). Bring your excess veg & herb plants to swap/donate, or take some away for a small donation!

Taking home: rocket, lettuce, chives, pot marigold, lemon balm, lovely black grass and a rowan sapling

Norwich: Food,Inc.

This must-see film tells an unwholesome story of big American agri-business, where working conditions, animal welfare, the livelihoods of farmers and consumers’ health are all held hostage by the drive for ever bigger profits.

The film highlights how a mere handful of companies control most of the food production business. One such company, Monsanto, has teams of detectives out scouring the countryside for farmers daring to save seed from one year to the next – or those that could be said to encourage such practice through their offer of services, like seed cleaning.

The film illustrates how ‘corn’ (maize to us) is turned into beef in the notorious feeding lot (with not a blade of grass in sight) – how corn indeed forms the basis for so many products in what seems on the surface to be an almost infinite choice in the modern American supermarket; how chickens (with echoes here of recent TV programmes by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall & Jamie Oliver) are crammed in their thousands into spaces where they can barely move around – and if they could, they’re so weighed down by grossly fattened bodies that their legs can’t carry them more than a few paces.

Don’t miss this film! Catch it at Cinema City on Monday, 29th March, 8.30 pm. Peter Melchett – Policy Director of the Soil Association and North Norfolk organic farmer – will be present at the end of the film for a Question & Answer session. The Soil Association is the official charity partner of the film.

Suggested links: http://www.foodincmovie.com/; and ‘Why Food, Inc. should make us all retch’ by Charles Clover in The Sunday Times: www.timesonline.co.uk/news.

(Sarah Gann/Transition Norwich Food Group)

Transition takes to the Streets

STOP PRESS! The notes of our Second Regional Gathering are up on the Transition East website and this blog has now gone officially regional! You can find notes on the day, plus individual reports of our open space and Transition Troubleshooting sessions on http://tinyurl.com/yl9ys3t. (see post and list below)

Meanwhile everything is hotting up (as it were) for the world's biggest Climate Action march, The Wave in London next Saturday. Coaches from all over the region are heading down to the city, and initatives from all over East Anglia are on board waving banners and wearing blue!

On Saturday 21 as part of the build up to Copenhagen, Transition Norwich and Sustainable Bungay took part of a lively and colourful demonstration and rally in the central streets of Norwich. Christine Way, core member of TN reports: "On Saturday 21st November several transitioners gathered in Chapelfield Gardens to join the biggest ever Norwich Climate March while Tom (Harper) set up the TN stall on Millennium Plain ready for the Climate Emergency rally. There was a buzz in the air as the organisers and police negotiated the route which had already been agreed. At last the Samba Band with its drums and colourful dancers started and we were on the move, but not for long as the traffic ahead of us came to a standstill on St Stephen’s Street. This gave us lots more time to hand out leaflets and get the message across to the fascinated shoppers that climate change is real and we need to act now. The Transition Norwich banner was up there near the front and was clearly visible on the TV News bulletins that went out over the weekend.

Then hundreds of people gathered outside the Forum for the Climate Emergency Rally where speakers including Dr Ian Gibson warned of the dangers of runaway climate change and of this being the “biggest issue of our time”. County Councillor Andrew Boswell said: "Gordon Brown should declare a National Climate Emergency and tell it like it is” and our very own Tully and Kate spoke about some of the solutions and all the positive things that are already happening in Transition Norwich and Bungay."

Meanwhile Maria Price and Mark Crutchley from Transition Norwich (Buildings and Energy) and Kate Jackson of Sustainable Bungay were interviewed by the Politics Show (East). TN were filmed conducting a light audit in various city centre shops, whilst Kate was hard at work on her allotment! The report is scheduled to be broadcast on Sunday 6th December in a programme on Climate Change which will also include an interview with Professor Kevin Anderson, head of the Tyndall Centre at UEA.

Watch this space for reports on The Wave and all other news and reviews of the region (including a report from last Sat's Greener Fram event!)