Secret location revealed for Open House tomorrow

We are delighted to announce the location of Open House and invite you to our first day of events on Sunday.

Open House is taking place in County Street, a stone’s throw from Elephant & Castle tube. See here for a map.Come down to check out Open House anytime from 12pm tomorrow, Sunday 12 May, for:

• Mural painting: a collaborative project exploring gentrification – arrive early for an all day event beginning at 10am
• Professor Danny Dorling on The Great Housing Disaster: a talk about the housing crisis and social justice – 4.30-6pm
• Open House, Open mouth, Open mic: music, poetry and spoken word – from 8.30pm

We’ve been making the space beautiful today and we’re really excited to kick off a great week of events with you. See you tomorrow!

Join us at Abundance London’s Herbal High Road, 18 May

Self Empowered Energy Revolution – Part 1

The Energy Group at Grow Heathrow is kicking of a series of Sustainable Technology training days with a workshop on how to build your own generator from scratch – Saturday 27th April at 11am – 6pm

The small Wind Turbine that was kindly donated by one of our supporters isn’t quite up to scratch for our battery bank. We need to make some new windings, so what better opportunity to share our knowledge than by inviting people to come and share in the experience.

We’ll be going through winding our own coils with ceramic coated wire, setting the magnets in resin and then configuring the coils to produce energy as the magnets pass.

The workshop will be accompanied by a delicious lunch.  Donations gratefully accepted where possible. Check out our Facebook event or email us at info@transitionheathrow.com for more information.

Come on down to Grow Heathrow to get skilled up for the Self Empowered Energy Revolution!

Recycled textiles @ Grow Heathrow

The sun shone gloriously on the meadow and on the creative beavers at the recycled textiles themed Crafternoons workshop last Saturday.

Locals and residents joined forces to revel in secondhand material, giving it a new lease of life in various mediums. Their woven masterpieces and fantastical fabric fairies now reside (for one month only!) in our new Crafternoons Exhibition Space, which is now open for all to enjoy.

Another free workshop brought to you by Grow Heathrow, don’t miss out on our next event, PRINTMAKING WITH LOU on Saturday 4^th May at 2pm.

Recycled textiles crafternoon

Join us at Grow Heathrow this Saturday for a free workshop exploring ways to recycle textiles creatively with Theresa and Steffie.

You’re welcome from 12 for the working group discussion, followed by lunch. From 1, learn how to weave rugs, patchwork, give old clothes and new lease of life and most excitingly make fabric fairies!

Crafternoons take place on the first Saturday of every month, and the next ones are print making (4 May) and mosaic reliefs (1 June).

Grow Heathrow’s spring chicken appeal

Do you own chickens? Well, we need you!

Grow Heathrow would like to get chickens again and would love your help. Come and share your skills in things like how to:

• look after chickens
• recognise pests, problems and diseases
• keep them entertained

Alternatively, if you’ve got some spare chicken feed, old feeders or equipment that you can donate we’d love that too. Anything would be a help and donations are gratefully accepted!

We’ve also got a chicken space working week from the 16th-19th April and we’re inviting everyone down to help out with getting the space ready for them. If you’re free and can come down then that would be great, but if not, feel free to come and visit any time, just give us a call so that we can put the kettle on.

If you’ve got questions send us an email and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

Finish the straw bale house!

It is time to put the icing on our big, delicious mud and straw cake. With the inside of our curvaceous, carbon sequestering community space coated in a lovely mixture of locally dug clay, straw, sand and poo from our resident horses; it is time to give the outside the same treatment.

This is a great opportunity to learn how to render in clay, build cob and wine bottle walls and have lots of filthy fun. On Sunday 7 April, we’ll also be holding a workshop on willow sculpture making. We have plenty of crash space, a lovely wood fuelled shower and will provide tasty squat pot for all mud slingers. We ask only a small donation for food (£2 per day) and a willingness to engage with the tasks that keep our little squattopia going i.e chopping wood and vegetables and a bit of washing up.

Feel free to come down for as much or as little of the week (Monday 1 April – Sunday 7 April) as you like but please let us know your intention so we can make sure we have enough beds and food.

Email info@transition.com to book a place or receive more details.

Get crafty with Grow Heathrow

On the first Saturday of every month, Grow Heathrow holds a variety of free art workshops. You are welcome to join us at 12 for the working group discussion, followed by lunch and the workshop, or come along at 1 for the workshop.

Here’s the timetable so far:

Saturday 6 April: Recycled textiles

Exploring ways to recycle textiles creatively with Theresa and Steffie, learn how to weave rugs, patchwork, give old clothes and new lease of life and most excitingly make fabric fairies!

Saturday 4 May: Printmaking

Exploring the use of natural and synthetic printmaking methods with Lou, including: hapa-zome Japanese natural printing, mon-printing, lino and collograph, exploring nature as inspiration.

Saturday 1 June: Mosiac reliefs

Recycled mosiac reliefs with Brenda, a workshop using bric a brac, bottle tops and broken tiles, inspired by Stephen Wright who creates bright, vivid image reliefs out of disused, unwanted materials. Come along with your bric a brac and turn it into a beautiful relief for your house or garden!

All ages and abilities welcome! For more information, call 07890751568 or send us an email at info@transitionheathrow.com.

Getting ready for the scrumping season

The London Orchard Project is an initiative promoting orchards and fruit trees in London. They are working with Londoners to plant and harvest apple, pear and plum trees all over the city, and help us all to rediscover the pleasure of eating home-grown fruit.

They are launching a new project, which aims to uncover existing orchards in London, and they’re looking for volunteers from all over London who have a bit of time available to help out with this project over the next six months.

The London Orchard Project have a database of potential orchard sites and need people to check whether they are indeed orchards and, if they are, to survey them to establish what state they are in. The survey data will be captured on a database so that we can get a much better picture of the state of London’s existing orchards and start to harvest them where possible!

You can see the map of orchards here. There are a lot potential sites in the Heathrow area, so when the sun comes out we’re going to hop on our bikes and go on an orchard hunt.

Stay tuned for more info.

Donate to get people building hobbit holes

Here’s an appeal from our friends at thePOOSH.org, an inspiring grassroots movement that’s supporting people to learn and try out green building for free. They’ve helped us roof our straw bale house, and engineered us a fuel efficient rocket stove that reduces wood consumption by burning secondary wood gases. Now they need some money to keep doing what they’re doing:

In September, thePOOSH team started a four month tour of the UK–travelling, speaking in Universities, helping at build sites and just spreading the word of sustainable building and the organisation. For now we have completed the tour and have in total of 14 build sites registered on our website in the UK.

Well a bit about thePOOSH. Our vision is to someday see a world where community-driven sustainable construction simply will be known as construction, and we want to inspire and empower people to build economical, sustainable, and community created structures by creating a network of volunteers that exchange knowledge, labour, and experiences!

At the end of the year we wrapped up the tour in Scotland where we spent a week intensively planning the future of thePOOSH: our goals, dreams, roles, responsibilities and about a thousand (+/-) future projects!

Well, we are growing fast, and as of today we have over 500 users and 41 build-sites (and at least one build-site on each inhabitable continent!) Today alone 20 new users joined our ranks! But we want to be even more constructive and we want to continue building the movement! Read the rest of this entry »