LIVING WITH SACRED SPACEA report by

The Sacred Land Project to

Community Action for Sacred Lands (CASL)

JOHN SMITHJune 2001

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors wish to thank first and foremostthe generous support and encouragement ofThe Shell Better Britain Campaign and espe-cially Jane, Peter and Sarah. I would also liketo thank David Attwell, Sue Clifford, SueCooper, Rebecca Cotton, Dr. Maddy Gray,Alison Murdoch, Ian Roberts, and To n yThapar, as well as the many others who vol-unteered their valuable time to make the suc-cess of the interviews possible. Finally Iwould like to thank those who took part inthe original focus group when the project wasbeing developed and to all my colleagues atICOREC for their technical support, com-ments and encouragement as well as the helpand advice from Philip James of SalfordUniversity.

CONTENTS

What is CASL? 1Summary and recommendations 2Discussion 4

Appendix 1: What is The Sacred Land Project 7Appendix 2: The interviews 8

Cistercian pilgrimage group: Wales 10Holywell restoration project group: North Petherwin, Cornwall 22Jamyang Buddhist Centre Community: Lambeth, London 30Shri Venkateswara (Balaji) Temple Trustees: Tividale, West Midlands 42Sue Clifford, Director Common Ground 46Sue Cooper, Community Environmental Officer 53Rebecca Cotton, Landscape Architect 55Ian Roberts, Environmental Consultant 59

SACRED LAND3 Wynnstay Grove

Manchester M14 6XGtel 0161 248 5731

fax 0161 248 5736sacredland@icorec.nwnet.co.uk

Community Action for Sacred Lands (CASL) is collaboration between Shell BetterBritain Campaign (SBBC) and The SacredLand Project (hereafter Sacred Land).

Sacred Land helps community and faithgroups to conserve, develop and create theirsacred spaces according to their own defini-tions.

SBBC have long been working at the com-munity level with all aspects of what is some-what optimistically known as ‘sustainabledevelopment’.

The partnership between these two organi-sations has come about because their workcan be seen to be interactive in method andoverlapping in objectives. The concepts of‘sustainable development’ and ‘sacred space’are both equally hard to define or agree upon,but both organisations recognise a commonunderstanding that human diversity in boththought and action is precisely the qualitythat will assist in finding solutions to themany great issues confronting humanity.Both organisations recognise that a diversityof faith and spiritual understandings con-tinue to impact upon our landscape and ourconcepts and use of nature.

Spaces set aside for spiritual nourishment,solitude, story telling, ritual, ceremony andremembrance and a whole host of other rou-tines as mundane as walking the dog, havelong been present in human culture. Thispublication there f o re seeks to present anunderstanding of the importance of theseplaces and the diversity with which they pre-sent themselves, reflecting equally diverseunderstandings of the environment and thedevelopment process.

The paper presented here is one of a num-ber of outputs of CASL. For more informationon this work please contact either Peter orSarah at SBBC on +44 121 248 5000 or John atSacred Land on +44 161 248 5731

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What is CASL?

In general, sacred space as an aspect of thee n v i ronment receives very little attentionfrom funding bodies or other agencies, and aconcern with faith and spirituality has notoften been seen as an important dynamic inour society. This can affect the co-operationand funding available from many environ-mental agencies and groups.

This report shows that faith does have far-reaching impacts, whether in the cherishingof an ancient churchyard or the building of anew Temple, Mosque or Gurdwara in aninner city area; it also shows that faith groupsare sometimes treated differently because of alack of understanding. This may arise notthrough prejudice, but from a desire for inclu-sivity and to avoid appearing to foster oneparticular spiritual outlook.

But people generally are able to take a fullerand more positive part in the developmentprocess if they see and feel that their needsand concerns are being met. This is a veryimportant part of the concept of sustainabledevelopment. Sacred space is often an expres-sion or an indicator of a move to meet some ofthose needs.

How might agencies better respond tothese needs?

How can the faith and community groupsthemselves foster greater understanding?

Much of the research for this report was byway of a number of interviews (transcribedand given as appendixes to this report). Theinterviews recorded here show that:• Sacred space is open and it need not be onlyfor the benefit of believers, devotees or thosesharing a common spiritual outlook• The development can both benefit and

engage a variety of interested parties and bewidely accepted as valid by a local commu-nity.• The conservation of sites has largely beenseen only from a narrow historic perspective.

Below we list a number of recommendationsthat we believe will assist in showing theimportance of sacred space, its role beyondserving its own believers, and the widerimplications for conservation and develop-ment. They are based upon the followingprinciples:

a) In a pluralistic society every major con-stituency of that society needs to be involvedin the major issues confronting that society.

b) Issues which any one of those con-stituencies regard as important and in need ofaddress should be given full and fair hearingand actions arising from any dialoguerespected and supported.

c) All of these constituencies have to adopta responsible and inclusive approach to main-taining their interests and by doing so willassist in creating a more sustainable future.

CASL’s recommendationsi. The role of faith, religion and spiritualityshould be given a greater place in the ongoingdialogue to work towards a more sustainablefuture, since people’s spirituality influencesand guides their attitude and actions towardssustainable development. ii. The inclusion of the faith and spiritualdimension in actions and dialogue towardssustainable development should start from alocal community level to help people actupon a wider understanding of sustainabilityand of environmental wellbeing.

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Summary and recommendations

iii. Environmental and development groupsworking in these fields should examine therole of faith and spirituality within their ownactivities and structures.iv. Faith groups should also recognise theresponsibilities they have towards the sus-tainability of the communities and environ-ments in which they exist and should worktowards broadening the use of their sacredspaces. v. Sacred space is not an intangible andabstract concept, but manifests itself in a verypractical and physical form in the landscapeand this should be recognised by interestagencies. vi. Sacred space should be recognised byplanners, policy makers and other practition-ers involved in environmental and commu-nity sustainability, as an important element ofour landscapevii. Guardians and stewards of sacred spaceshould work together to draw up best prac-tice guidelines for environmental wellbeingin these places, and should encourage theircongregations to use these guidelines in theirwider environments. viii. In the multifaith context faiths shouldmove beyond working to understand eachother, towards developing practical measuresthat can be jointly supported that wouldmake best use of their sacred spaces for boththemselves and the wider community.

CASL initiatives to facilitate the above• Shell Better Britain Campaign and SacredLand Project through its joint initiativeCommunity Action for Sacred Lands bringtogether a small group (up to twelve people)with an interest in sacred space and the over-

all place of faith and spirituality in sustain-able development, to seek a higher profilewithin the issues of sustainable developmentand conservation. The group to meet no morethan three times a year to discuss ways inwhich this can be done.• The meetings of this group should be heldinitially in different regions of the country toassess that region and then to engage a widergroup which will include local representa-tives with shared interests.• These groups would then seek funds forappropriate activities to meet any particularobjective sought (e.g. seminars, practicalwork etc)• The CASL initiative organise in two yearstime a national two-day conference on theplace of sacred space and faith/spirituality inour landscape and communities. The confer-ence would review existing work and iden-tify better practice and ways forward ratherthan an academic study of the subject,although it would welcome the participationof academic institutes.

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The development and conservation of sacredspace which is beyond a narrow historic per-spective and has engaged more than justbelievers, is at present very patchy. There has,for example, been a recognition by bothchurch users and conservation groups of theecological value of many ChristianChurchyards in Britain. But there needs to bea wider recognition of the values the sacredhas given to the landscape quite apart from aspecific belief perspective. The evidence ofthis need for a wider consideration is the waymany local communities rally to conserve orc reate something that they determine assacred.

The spiritual and religious map of Britain ischanging, but looking at this change as awhole gives a better perspective than thecommonly painted and well-publicised pic-ture of decline and increasing irrelevance.Figures for churchgoers are only one part of avery much more complex pattern. They donot explain why people choose to walk fordays on end on pilgrimage and yet declarethemselves "not really religious" (see theinterview with the Cistercian pilgrimagegroup) or that a homelessness case worker ishappy to see the involvement, through theuse of their space, of a faith he does not follow(see the Jamyang Buddhist Centre interview).Are we to believe that the majority of the 39million people who annually visit Britain'sc h u rches and cathedrals do so simply inorder to visit an old building? There is a spir-itual dimension to all these things that isunder-regarded. In the conservation of ourlandscape and its communities that dimen-sion is often expressed through the markingand use of sacred space. While sacred space is

still highly regarded by believers in most tra-ditions, it seems likely that its use today isjust as much by non-believers or non-specificbelievers.

In the work undertaken with many localgroups, some from specific religious tradi-tions but many not, Sacred Land’s uniqueperspective has found a common narrativeand objectives. They have added diversity toour outlook and our landscapes just as wehave added to theirs. But there are still manywho see no place for a spiritual and religiousinvolvement in planning and conservationexcept as a managing body, for example, inthe conservation of an old church. Spiritualvalues are often not considered except asbeing of interest to individuals. This docu-ment shows that an outlook that sees and val-ues the sacred can benefit a much widergroup.

The interviews with the various groupsshow examples of how the conservation orcreation of sacred spaces is an importantdimension of the development process. If weare seeking sustainability in this process thensacred space must directly or indirectly be apositive or negative contributor. It will neverbe irrelevant.

The creation or conservation of sacre dspace can be contentious and add conflict toalready difficult situations. The process maynot be free from the conflict that occurs in thewider community. We believe however, thatin Britain at least these are a small minority ofcases and can with willingness be turnedround to be positive contributions to thediversity of our landscape and communities.The Hindu Temple project, for example,sought from the outset to be of benefit to the

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Discussion

whole local community and not just the tem-ple followers, and this was eventually recog-nised after initial refusal of planning permis-sion.

We have sought to highlight diversity in thep rocess which has brought these pro j e c t stogether but at the same time shown theiruniqueness. Sue Clifford in her contributiontalked about local distinctiveness in the phys-ical environment, and we also need to recog-nise the spiritual diversity and distinctivenessof our landscape and community. Sue doesn’tdirectly refer to faith and religion but herapproach to the environment, and CommonGround’s, has a distinct spiritual quality. TheJamyang Buddhist Centre, Balaji Temple andthe Welsh Cistercian Projects show a faith-dri-ven, but inclusive, approach to developmentand environmental understanding, either byway of a journey of understanding throughsacred space or a creation of it. In the NorthPetherwin project one cannot easily separateheritage conservation from the faith thatmarked the landscape and which continues togive meaning today. While some conserva-tion arises from historical interest a good dealis clearly grounded in present day beliefs andhow those beliefs have made markersthroughout history and continue to shape ourlives. This is clearly expressed in the inter-view with the Cornish group, for example.Conservation is in this respect a way of mark-ing belief.

The ideal model for sustainable develop-ment often quoted, is that of the three-leggedstool where environment, economic andsocial legs make the sustainable stool.Spirituality (faith specific and non-specific) isnot considered except possibly as an element

of the social.Development by its very nature is a risky

business. No matter how well controlled andwhat the state of our knowledge and under-standing, it is, in part, a journey into theunknown. Any model for development if it isgoing to be a useful tool needs to considerhow the risk element is dealt with. All theprojects highlighted here have in part usedtheir spiritual outlook to guide them throughthe risks inevitably presented by their pro-jects, not just as a source of hope and encour-agement, but as a guide to what is needed inthe first place. The faith or spiritual outlookbecomes a guide to the risk as well creating asthe rationale for it.

Such a model may be more problematic towork with, but the successes of the projectsoutlined in this document are perhaps thebest demonstration that it works.

Sustainable development, as both IanRoberts and Sue Clifford indicate above, is asmuch process as it is product. There is no bet-ter example of this than the beauty of bothp rocess and product in sacred space.Recognising the need for a spiritual input intothe development process and its relationshipwith perceptions of the environment maymean that sustainable development couldgain wider understanding beyond plannersand policy makers.

The projects reviewed here would suggestthat the ideas and values of faith and spiritualinputs are gaining ground. If we look at theexperience of North Petherwin, Jamyang andBalaji, relationships with local authorities aregenerally on a workable basis, and withJamyang they are particularly good. Theseexamples are important because of the gener-

5

ally accepted view that local authority is amajor player in the process of sustainability.In view of these and other experiences theremust be more highlighting of these successstories. It is still often the case, in SacredLand’s experience, that faith groups are notwell-considered by local authorities and thatthese authorities do not reach out to thesegroups as they do to others.

Before Sacred Land began work, no schemehad attempted to bring together such adiverse range of groups, with a multitude ofunderstandings and worldviews, for the spe-cific task of care and development of sacredspaces in Britain. The models that have beencreated by Sacred Land through the experi-ence of this work are now gaining interest onan international scale. It was thought there-fore that even a small number of the experi-ences of these groups would be worthrecounting for others to draw both inspira-tion and understanding from them. Drawingout the experiences of a small number of localgroups working in some way with sacredspace, their progress and achievements in thiswork, and the views of a number of profes-sionals working in related areas of interest,became then the objective of this researchproject for CASL It is hoped through thisresearch and a number of other CASL initia-tives, that a better understanding of sacredspace in the context of community and envi-ronmental sustainability will be achieved.

6

Sacred Land works with local groups seekingto conserve and create what has been definedby those groups as sacred space. In practicemany of the groups have easily recognisedfaith affiliation e.g. Buddhist, Christian,Hindu etc. but where this is so support is onlygiven where inclusiveness rather than exclu-siveness is the approach. So for example a sitebelonging to a church or temple of a particu-lar faith group would need to open to albefore Sacred Land was able to offer supportto any proposed development (meaning toinclude conservation). In a number of casesthat Sacred Land has been involved ingroups, of a non specific spiritual outlook,have come together through a recognitionthat in their environment space need be setaside for what they define as spiritual needsbe that quiet contemplation or communitycelebration. Sacred Land neither seeks com-munities to work with nor sites it may con-sider in need of conservation measures of onesort or another but is entirely reactive andm e rely responds to groups appro a c h i n gthem. Although much of the work involvessite based considerations Sacred Land workswith the groups to help them identify theirneeds in terms of their spiritual understand-ings and their expression in the landscape. Itis sometimes the case that a group may feel aneed for space but then be unsure as to whyor what they wish to do within it. The sup-port Sacred Land gives is primary throughassistance in building partnerships withorganisations and other groups who can givepractical support to a project. It further seeksto build a wider network between thesegroups and organisations, as an importantelement in sustaining the achievements so far

made. Sacred Land was launched in 1997 byWorld Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) UK andAlliance of Religions and Conservation(ARC). It was set up as a project of ARC, whohave been working at the international levelsince 1995 with faith communities and tradi-tions from, primarily eleven world faiths onenvironmental projects at all scales, in part-nership with WWF, The World Bank, GlobalE n v i ronmental Forum, national and localgovernments among others.

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Appendix 1

What is The Sacred Land Project?

The major part of this report consists of inter-views with groups and individuals who havebeen involved with Sacred Land. The reasonthis approach was chosen was to allow thoseactively involved in conserving and creatingsacred space to speak for themselves. Thepeople interviewed, in the case of the projectgroup interviews, were only a small part ofthe groups they re p resented. There werelogistical difficulties in bringing any fullgroup together but this limited form of inter-view was still felt more appropriate than sim-ply comment by the author upon thosegroups. Furthermore, the groups themselvesare just a small number of those to whomSacred Land has given support.

The particular groups chosen for the inter-view were selected because they weredeemed to be success stories. This paper isnot testing but expressing a particular view,that sacred space and spiritual and religiousoutlooks have a specific and valid role inwhat many describe as sustainable develop-ment and environmental wellbeing. Thepaper would hope to show that the groups’experiences and what they had to say wouldillustrate practical examples and give a betterunderstanding of this view. It was notintended that they be a statistical demonstra-tion of the validity or otherwise of the viewsexpressed. We believe we have presented athorough basis for that view, and it is left forothers who may wish to do so to question andtest its validity.

The research is intended to investigate par-ticular issues and topics in the discussion onsustainability. It is felt that spirituality and theplace of sacred space has to a degree beenneglected by some of the major players in this

discussion. This paper is intended to assist inthe redressing of this neglect as well as toshow how others think and feel about thesubject. It was thought that conducting inter-views, as the major part of the exerc i s e ,would be valid for the following reasons:

a) It allows a direct input into the research ofthe experience of groups who are working inthe areas of interest. b) It was felt that the groups would be able tosay as much as they wanted while at the sametime be guided by the interests of the researchobjectives.c) The interviews with the professional work-ers in the field would contribute an importantadded dimension as many community pro-ject groups seek the support of such profes-sionals.d) While not a new approach it was felt thatthis method would make a very readable,interesting and important document.

The selection of the groups was expected tobe difficult: there were a great many to choosefrom, but the length of time needed for col-lecting the interviews and turning them intowritten text precluded both too wide a rangeor a lengthy selection process. The final selec-tion was therefore an arbitrary one by theauthor on the basis of what he consideredsuccessful and mature ventures. It is hopedthose chosen reflect a diversity that is repre-sentative of the work of Sacred Land.

What one might term ‘mature’ pro j e c t swere chosen as it was thought real experiencewould be better than perceptions from newg roups just entering the pro c e s s .Unsuccessful or abandoned projects would it

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Appendix 2

The Interviews

9

was felt lead to a discussion on why they hadfailed rather than on the main topic underconsideration. It could be argued that unsuc-cessful projects do question the validity of theviews expressed and this point is noted.However it was felt successful undertakingsdo give support to one of the main con-tentions of this report namely that a diversityin response to the issues under review doesexist and should be highlighted. Unsuccessfulprojects do not necessarily present an argu-ment against this view just because theyfailed.

There have inevitably been other limita-tions on the selection of the groups and indi-viduals who have taken part. While projectgroups move and progress at a pace they findcomfortable (a process very much supportedby Sacred Land) it was necessary to interviewgroups who have had a wide range of experi-ences as the result of their project. SacredLand does not recognise success or failure bythe length it takes one group to do somethingwhich another group may have done in halfthe time. What is important is that the groupsshould have control and ownership both ofthe nature of their project and of how theywish to proceed with it, including thetimescale. Selecting project groups that are ata high stage of development almostinevitably means that they have some sort ofsuccess record to gain this maturity.

Because the nature of the research is domi-nated by the concept of diversity of approachand response, it was felt the list should reflectSacred Land’s multi-faith approach. The pil-grimage project was included specificallybecause it was dealing with pilgrimage andwould therefore offer a different perspective

of both project type and relationships and useof sacred space.

The selection of the professionals was froma much narrower choice and was limited to apool of people who it was felt had gonebeyond supplying resources to groups butwho had also dealt in varying degrees withthe subjective values discussed.

While it is highly likely that any other set ofinterviewees (even within the selected pro-jects) would have produced diff e re n tresponses, we uphold the value of what isoffered here. Dealing with subjective viewsand world outlooks elicits subjective opin-ions, no matter how well considered orauthoritative. This material is offered not ascase studies from which major generalisa-tions can be made but rather a diversity ofoutlooks with a shared theme from whichsome generalisations can arise. Just as sacredspace can only be defined by example, so toocan response to its need and the value of thatneed.

Please note:The text of the interviews given here areedited versions of the full texts. It was neces-sary to do this for reasons of length and read-ability. While it is hoped the spirit and mean-ing of what was said is retained in the text inorder to make reading easier, certain gram-matical changes have also been made. Onceagain I would like to remind the reader thesetexts have been agreed by those involved inthe interviews.

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Interviewees: The South Wales PilgrimG r o u p

The group size, twelve people, made it impracticalto use names from the recorded interview. Theexceptions to this are Dr. Maddy Gray, because ofher prominent role in the pilgrimage, and if any -body is asked to speak by name. Maddy, a histo -rian from University College, Newport, was themain organiser and route planner for the pilgrim -age, which went to all of the Welsh Cistercianhouses, past and present.

M: We are not really a group - we are totallyinclusive, the group is anybody who wantedto be interested in getting involved at anystage of the project. The project was to workout and then walk a long distance footpathlinking all the Cistercian Abbeys of Wales,medieval and modern. Men’s and women’shouses were included, as part of the celebra-tions of the nine hundredth anniversary ofthe founding of the Cistercian order whichwas celebrated in 1998. How about Petertelling us all how it got started. This will com-municate what a totally ad hoc thing it is.Peter: Well I’ve been accused of instigating it.I think the first thing was that Brother Gildasfrom Caldey rang Maddy or I or both early onreally saying there’s an anniversary what arewe doing about it? I'm sure he did it to othersas well and David Robinson from Cadw ( fulltitle: Cadw Welsh Historic Monuments ExecutiveA g e n c y ) was interested in whether eventscould take place or not with the church and

Cadw. We sat and discussed this with JohnGuy and came up with a number of thingsincluding a concert and somewhere along thisI said what about a Cistercian trail?

M: You used the word 'fun' and then every-one looked at me and they said 'you like thatsort of thing'. So we all agreed it was totallyimpossible and I went home and got themaps out. That was how it got started and Ithink in the course of the project we were acore group of about twenty people who werere s e a rching and walking the route. Therewere a lot more people walking very shortsections of it. I think we were getting on for ahundred on the day we walked up to Penrhysfor example. There must have been forty orfifty other people who supported us by giv-ing accommodation, doing bits of research,helping to organise church services and othercommemorative events on the way. When wewalked it in the summer of '98 we wanted toarrange some sort commemorative event ateach Cistercian sites on the way and we didjust about mange to do that.

Can you explain the link between Cadw andthe pilgrimage? With some heritage conserva-tion bodies there has been a move away fromlinking historic sites, especially historicallysacred sites, with religious perceptions andpresent day spiritual perceptions.

M: They held services at Tintern, they heldservices at Strata Florida, and they were cer-tainly very happy for us to hold services atthe other places as well. I think their thinkingtends to be architecture, archaeology ratherthan spirituality and you are always havingto pull them in the direction of and remindingthem the most important thing about a reli-gious house is not its buildings and its archi-tecture it’s the thinking and the belief. Theyweren’t in the driving seat as far as the spiri-tuality side of it was concerned but they werecertainly supportive weren’t they? and DavidRobinson was very very keen that this should

CistercianPilgrimagegroup: Wales

happen he did push very hard for it

Was that policy or was that just an individ-ual’s approach? Wales is so much smallerthan England and Cadw is so much smallerthan English Heritage (EH) and one canknow a fair number of people in it but equallyI think they react one against another in dif-ferent ways than English heritage does.

M: In a way I think there are more beliefs andvalues in Cadw than EH. You get that feeling,that the things they choose to commemorate,the things that they choose to focus on, per-haps because they are aware that amongother things they have to think about what isdistinctly Welsh. What it is they are doing andwhat is distinctively Welsh is often a matter ofbeliefs and values and a distinctive approachto religion.

Were the Cistercian Houses distinctly Welsh?

M: I think they were, yes we need to go intoan awful lot of history explaining that one.

Basically they went native?

M: Yes they went native very very quicklyeven the ones that were founded from out-side, even the ones that were founded byNorman Marcher Lords (apart I suppose fromTintern) went native very quickly. One of thereasons why we were so keen to celebrate theanniversary in Wales was that the Cistercianswere not just tied up with Welsh spiritual lifebut with politics and cultural life. To thatextent that they gave support to movementslike Owain Glyndwr independence campaignso yes they were distinctive.

Did Cadw see this as a promotional possibil-ity?

M: Well I think they more or less had to see itas a promotional opportunity because that iswhat they're there for. That was how they

were able to justify doing what they weredoing but certainly for David there was a lotmore to it than that.

Yes he was involved in a number of otherprojects to do with the Cistercians. He wasquite happy to be involved in some of thethings we were doing on the site.

On the group itself, how did you get to knowabout this? I know some of you did bits of it,some of you did big bits of it, and some of youdid all of it and by the sound of it got verywet. What was the process?

M: We started working on the 98 pilgrimagein the autumn of 96. Peter came up with theidea and I suppose we had 14/15 monthsthen.

Peter: The work we had done five or sixyears earlier preceded that.

M: Yes, there was already a core group inexistence. For some years now we have beenwalking every year from Llantarnam which isa Cistercian Abbey site near Cwmbran inSouth Wales up to Penrhys in the Rhondda. Inthe middle ages this was a shrine dedicated tothe Vi rgin Mary and maintained by theC i s t e rcian monks from LlantarnaM: A l a n ,some others and I constructed the route fromLlantarnam to Penrhys. It a route a medievalpilgrim could have taken and we walked thatwith a local ecumenical group over the pastfive or six years. So that was a sort of coregroup of people we could contact and a partof the route we eventually used. That washow we started off in 1998, walking thosethree days from Llantarnam up to Penrhys.

Other members of the group explain howthey got involved:

My husband has done a course with Maddyand he got circulated in the post and he saidoh this might interest you it’s a Cistercianwalk, he’s interested in walking and I’m

11

interested in Cistercians so that was how wegot involve. We did a week and said we havegot to go back for some more!

I saw a press release in a magazine andthought this looks interesting and I wonderedwhat I was going to do that summer

What was the magazine?

It’s Retreat (a magazine that advertises retreatsand pilgrimage). I saw some of the peopleinvolved and thought cor that’s an incrediblyambitious idea how on earth can you do that.Then I though it would be quite nice to dothat and I thought about it for a bit and so wedecided we go.

There’s a long history of maintaining old sitesbut what about the journey in between thosesites? I know you tried to walk as well as youcould the original routes but how importantis it that people know they where the originalroutes and should they be maintained, espe-cially when the landscape has changed somuch?

I think you get something from it when youare walking from one site to the next, whenyou know the monks had done both routes.O.K, so the weather is wet, but you realisedthat the monks had to do this and you weredoing something that someone else had donebefore you. They had done it with a greatersense of adventure and spirit than you couldpossibly bring to it. I mean Marlene was abrilliant on pilgrimage, oh she was a pilgrimin a thousand.

M: Marlene isn’t here but I shall tell youhow she got involved. Marlene is an intensiveinternal care nurse who works in Bath and it’sa very tough job, you dig very deep into yourspiritual reserves doing that kind of thing. It's50% hard gruelling work and it's 50% holdingtheir hands and watching them die and this isvery tough. She’s English but she is very very

keen on all thing Welsh and she subscribes tothe Heritage in Wales’s magazine in whichDavid Robinson put quite a substantial articleabout what we were doing. She was so firedup with enthusiasm that she contacted meand asked for details and arranged to meet usat Whitland. We walked from Whitland up toCwmystwyth and she was obviously havingdifficulty walking the first few days. She’s notbuilt like a walker - she’s short and she’s quiteplump and she had these, well we were quitesnooty about her boots because they weren’tproper walking boots. She was having greatdifficulty going up the hill and you thoughtoh dear she’s not fit. After about a week shefinally plucked up the courage to tell us thatthat she thought she had been walking on abroken foot. She had slipped very badly twodays before she set off and the foot hadswollen up and the toenails had gone black.She couldn’t wear her proper walking bootswhich is why she was wearing this pair ofsoft shoes but she was so determined to go onthe pilgrimage. She said it wasn’t a questionof wanting to, she needed to and she neededthat kind of spiritual recharging and therewas no way she was not going to do it even ifshe had to do it with a broken foot and so shedid it with a broken foot. She’s a very inspir-ing person to walk with she’s a very practical,very common-sensical, you know no spiritualairs and graces but obviously very dedicatedto what she was doing and now I suppose hasbe come a permanent member of the pilgrim-age group. She walked on the Penrhys routelast year and she’s coming again this year - sothat’s Marlene.

What’s the diff e rence between pilgrimageand just going for a walk, even a six hundredmile walk?

I could say there probably isn’t much differ-ence because I haven’t got any strong reli-gious views at all. But to me it was a greatwalk and I have got to admit that there wereplaces that we went to, and some of the sites

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where we stopped, where there was a feelingabout the place that you could sense peoplehad been there before had lived there, evenwhen we were in the middle of a field inMonmouth and unless someone told youthere was a site under the ground you wouldthink it was an ordinary field but you couldstill sense that history there.

Is the sense of the landscape that you arepassing through part of the inspiration to dopilgrimage?

It’s a general interest in history in what peo-ple had done before. Its quite amazing to seesome of these places and try to imagine whatthey were like before they where ruins. Just tounderstand how people could have builtthem, how they could have organised reli-gious or any sort of society in that location

What benefits do you think, if any that wegain today by understanding thoseprocesses?

Benefits for who?

Individually or for society more generally, atany level you care to think about?

I did enjoy it but it was just a walk. But I thinkI got more out of it because it was a pilgrim-age. Some of the places were dead sites butPenrhys is such an active community and itstill has connections with the Cistercians overon Caldey Island. There I didn’t feel I waslooking at historic sites but that they werepresent day sites and I felt the same too aboutHolywell. There’s no way to describe that as acommunity in the past because it hasremained so active in the present. So it wasmore than just a walk and more than a thingof the past.

M: We probably thought we were gettingsome sort of strength from the fact that theplaces where we were going had been spiri-

tually important to the past. There’s thatpiece by T.S. Eliot where he talks about placeswhere prayer has been valid and it was niceto feel what we were doing was helping tokeep them alive. The places where we hadservices along the way, when we got toBasingwerk, for example, we sang Complinein the ruins and it was probably the first timeit had been sung there since the dissolution ofthe monasteries.

We also went to places where in spite of thefact that the monastery had been dissolvedthe church was very active and Penrhys was-n’t the only one. It was nice to be part of acontinuum, of a spiritual tradition, it was niceto feel part of that strength, the strength of thepast and also the strength of the survivingtradition nowadays. I think you're trying toreconstruct a bit, trying to walk where peoplehave walked before and sometimes it isimportant that you walk where people havewalked before and that strengthens you. Butit is also a matter of creating something newin the way of sacredness in the landscape itsnice to do both really.

To know that people are going to do it in adifferent manner, people will continue to do itand people will do it for all kinds of differentreasons. I think whether or not it’s a pilgrim-age will depend on the person who is doingit. You take your own sacred space with youon a pilgrimage in a way and it’s a pilgrimagebecause it’s a sacred journey to a sacred placeand whatever’s sacred for you is what makesit a pilgrimage.

I think that is true also of not necessarilyjust the Cistercian centres we visited but alsoof the religious places on route. I think partic-ularly of a ruined church just south of west ofSt. Clears with the graves and the stones ofthe alleged pilgrims that were buried there.

M: Well that was a pilgrimage church Thisis the church of Llandeilo Abercywyn. There

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are two churches either side of the Cywynestuary between Carmarthen and Tenby andone is Llandeilo Abercywyn and the other isLlanfihangel Abercywyn. They are both inruins. They were quite big churches in the latemiddle ages and they were quite importantbecause they were on a pilgrimage route of StDavid’s and one of them has medieval gravesin the grave yard and they are traditionallysaid to be pilgrims that didn’t make it. It wasamazing, it was right out in the middle ofnowhere on the mud flats overlooking theestuaries of the Cywyn and the Taf and it wasa strange place, a very strange feeling yes.

Apart from the Cistercian houses did peoplefeel because they where walking a pilgrimagethat they were more sensitised to the wholelandscape. Was there a sense that people werelearning things about the landscape that theyhad not really thought about?

Are you suggesting that in the pilgrimageroute people aren’t interested in the scenerythey where walking through but that theywould have gone anywhere regardless butwalkers would deliberately pick out things.

To some measure the original pilgrimroutes were determined by the logisticsplaces to stay, inns etc and of course there wasthe issue of safety in the middle ages.

If you think of the public footpaths nowmost of them are low down based on the his-toric need to get from A to B.

M: If you think of the way we consciouslytried to avoid the heavy tarmac road and thiswas partly safety because of heavy lorries butit's also aesthetically we don’t find it pleasantto walk on tarmac road. Similarly we are seri-ously thinking of doing some work on a sec-tion of the North Wales coastline that we did.Here we had six or seven miles of walkingbetween the breakwater and the caravan sitesand it was boring and we didn’t like it. Some

would say you have to do these thingsbecause you have to take the spiritual intothat environment. You cannot ignore thisbecause you don’t like the look of them and apilgrimage has to go through these things. Sothere is going to be a difference - there’salways going to be tension between the longdistance walkers who head for the hills andthe open ground or head for the pleasantplaces and those who say go through the dif-ficult bits, do something with them.

Is there anything wrong with changing theroute if it looks nothing like what it wouldhave done?

M: If its not helping you spiritually, I mean, apilgrimage has to help you spiritually or ifyou are being spiritual it has to help you.

Isn’t it getting closer getting back to natureand so having a slightly different route?

M: The problem is we can’t re c reate amedieval pilgrimage. We are not medievalpeople, we haven’t got all that emotional lug-gage, we cannot think or see things in thesame way. Our values about landscape aretotally different. They would have valued set-tled, cultivated, ord e red land as we nowvalue wilderness and isolation, bleaknesseven, because its what we haven’t got muchof any more.

Wilderness and bleakness to them was anever present threat and that’s what they hadto fight against and they would not havewanted it. They for example wouldn’t havelooked ideally to go over the top of the moun-tain for example but to have stayed to theedges of cultivated land wherever they could.So we can’t really create what it would havefelt like the medieval pilgrim going for exam-ple from Strata Florida to Cwmystwyth andso to a certain extent we have got to work outfor us what works as well. Part of the problemthat we have become aware of is that different

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things are going to work for different people,some would want to walk through the cara-van park and some would want to head forthe hills. I would dither.

So we need to incorporate both the caravanpark into the spiritual because there is thisgreat mass unknowing about God.

M: Yes but given that you are not walkingacross it with a banner you are just a groupchatting among each other walking along thebreakwater how do people know we area pil-grims anyway?

It doesn’t matter - you're thinking of the sit-uation anyway.

I think also the pilgrims of the past wouldnot have had the emotion of a sickeningmodernity so I would have thought that theattraction of landscapes would have been abit less.

M: If you would have had to fight your waythrough it, you would have gone for the easi-est path and the landscape would have beena challenge.

Well it was a challenge to Marlene.

I think the walk we did was not followedby very many medieval travellers. You werecrossing the North reverence from the southreverence and to some extent that is a differ-ent ball game. They probably walked shorterdistances for a very specific reason either theywere going across the North Welsh coastt o w a rds Bardsey Island or towards St.David’s or the very short ones like we havedone.

M: There are long routes leading to StrataFlorida from a lot of Wales because StrataFlorida had such important relics.

Again when you think of the population of

say Pembrokeshire as seen in medieval timesthe number of people who would havewalked to those sections would have beenvery small. The chances are if it was impor-tant they would have been coming from theMidlands and eastern regions.

M: So what we were doing? we weren’treally trying I suppose to re c o n s t ruct amedieval pilgrimage but we were trying touse parts of medieval pilgrimage routes toconstruct a pilgrimage of our own.

I felt we were walking in most parts for thespiritual experience anyway.

Someone was saying before how do otherpeople know you're pilgrims, does it matter?Was there any publicity and if so what wasthe response?

I think a shock to us was when we got to HolyWell in Basingwerk. A motley crew of half adozen individuals in shorts and slightlytravel worn and to find that they had centreda whole day around us, I mean it was mindblowing really. It put a completely differentperspective on the walking because all thesepeople had come from different parts just tosee us as pilgrims, and that was quite chal-lenging to your thinking. You realise otherpeople had come because these people hadwalked and they wanted to touch you and benear you gosh look these are the pilgrims andyou think yes I’m nothing special I’m just anordinary person who walked.

But did it make you feel special?

Yeah it went incredibly well and going to thewalk when you left your hostel going to HolyWell was very spiritual. That was the firsttime really that I felt it was a spiritual experi-ence, up until then it had been harrowing. Ithad been a social experience and a physicaltest and I didn’t feel anything real about it.The services I felt were quite public, they

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were events for the people and we were tak-ing part because they knew about it inadvance. I initially got into it from theTe n b y s h i re pilgrimage. I heard about thisthing when I was in my second year andthought I would like to walk it during myholidays so I’ll join in but as for a pilgrimageit really hadn’t been me. I go to church andworship every Sunday anyway. On the firstday we were involved in it, it was a Sundayanyway and the next day it involved a serviceand that seemed to tie in with the public sidebut when we got to Holy Well then it felt yeahit was spiritual then . Basingwerk to me thatwas a bit like a fete. I wouldn’t say it was spir-itual at all it was just a shock to have the thingthey put on at the end, when we wereexpected to perform (they were asked to takepart in an historic re-enactment). It was morehistorical to tell you the truth, the historicalgroup who do re-enactments I didn’t findthem in their selves very Christian in thereapproach. It was quite an ordeal because itwas very, very hot and the best part for methe realisation of anything or of everythingwas at Holy Well and the waters there.

When I came back I thought more on whereI had been but at the time it had been quitearduous. It was good fun though and therewas a tremendous sense of comradeship andfriendship.

But not spiritual all the way thro u g hbecause it was so harrowing. But when yourealised we had followed authentic routes,which we presumably did, and we had hadthe historical landmarks and things toauthenticate it, but then how near to what theCistercians were, were we?. We where tryingto ape theM:

How important was that to you?

Very important at the end and very importantat different stages. Do you remember whenwe were looking for this farm and we went to

Thomas Stone’s house, the historian, that wasa wonderful house, a very very beautifulhouse we stayed in. Then we went onto thefarm and I got my Bible, I found that veryspiritual. That was very good because youwere then in present day times and times hadmoved on and buildings were now beingused for other things but there was that sensethe buildings, although you were there today,there was that sense that they had been usedfor something else in the past. Like Gordonsaid when you went to places you felt thatpeople had been there before you, it was a bitlike that.

M: Do you think that was one of the thingsabout Holywell? As well as the fact that it hadbeen such an important place for so long andthat so many people had gone there - wouldwe had felt that way about somewhere thatwas new?

No there was definitely a feeling about thestones actually around the pool there and thatserenity the water was giving, it was amaz-ing. But what were we looking for when thatfarmer was shouting at us? where we knewwe had gone the wrong way but we just pre-tended.

M: Oh yes we were on the right pathbecause the stile was there and the way markwas there but he had put the drinking troughslap bang right across the stile so it wasincredibly muddy so we were climbing overbarbed wire and things to get round it. Wewere looking for a holy well.

That's Llaneilian yn-Rhos where there wasa very important Holy Well that had becomea cursing well in the 19th century

That’s right what had happened?

M: It had taken an enormous amount of effortby the local non-conformist minister, andevery body else, to get people to stop using

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it. It had been used on a very regular basis forpeople who wanted to curse people theyweren’t getting on with. And then we discov-ered that the woman from the farm had actu-ally made our tea from water from the well.

I think you hit upon an interesting pointwhen you talk about Holywell in that youhad to dress up and the group there who nor-mally dress up in Cistercian robes. I think thatwas one of the problems we hit all the wayalong. It's the conception of people of whatpilgrims are. I remember the first walk wedid, a photographer turned up to photographus and was terribly disappointed we were allin anoraks and walking boots. Luckily forhim we had the monk with us and he waspushed into the foreground. People seem tothink what we are trying to recreate is a fancydress concept when in fact we are looking forsomething completely different.

They were interested because I think peo-ple are looking for something. People arelooking for more spirituality, they are lookingfor something in their lives that's lacking. Ithink you got the impression that theythought you had got a little of that and thatthey were hoping that they might just get acrumb or two of it.

I felt the opposite of that - that the peoplewho joined us were quite into what we weredoing; obviously they had been warned inadvance and they intended to join us.

Well the most obvious evidence of thatwere the people on the doors who came out totheir doors from Llanwynno to Penrhys. Theycame out in the street and said "you're actu-ally walking to Penrhys when there's a bus,oh its nine miles wow that's wonderful andyou're on a pilgrimage, it's great, innit".

That was quite a different experience thanI found. I felt that if you say you’re a pilgrimyou are sort of held at arms length but I felt

when going to Penrhys and particularly fromLlanwynno as well, that that was open foreverybody irrespective of whether they weredoing it for religious reasons or whatever. Ifelt there was something unique about that. Ican remember a couple of things particularly,one of them was when we were coming downf rom that church at Llanwynno and weveered off towards the forest, there were twogirls and two disabled children there andthey were all singing away beautifully. Later Ithink when we got down into Stanleytown,we climbed that steep bank from Stanleytownto Penrhys and we were all gasping and wegot to the top and there was this large crowd.In that there were four or five children inwheelchairs and we got to the top and Ithought they would have given their eyeteeth to have been out of breath coming upthat hill. To me it was a straightening outexperience and it was a humbling experience.My own experience of that, I don’t know howI can describe it, I’m not a religious person. Itchanged my view of Penrhys in another way.I left a pair of binoculars on the steps of thecross and they were there when I returned forthem.

M: Anywhere else and they might not havebeen. That was on the steps of the statue was-n’t it? That statue was a very very sacredplace in Penrhys. Whatever the reputation ofPenrhys and it has had appalling things saidabout it over the years, that statue has neverbeen vandalised. There's graffiti on every-thing else but not on that statue because it’s astatue of a woman and a child and you knowthey are not going to vandalise it.

The first time I walked, and I just lovewalking now, I think of all the places you cango to. I use to think there were roads andstreets and now I know there is much more toBritain than that and that’s just sort of stayedwith me. I go walking now whenever I can.

I always valued the friendships because

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when you walk with people for three or fourdays at a time you get to know people quitewell. They talk their problems through, andyou talk your problems through and at theend of it you come to some kind of consensus.We generated a common bond after the walk.

Some people you tend to walk with morethan others because different people walk atdifferent paces so there are probably two orthree groups. Yes I found out a lot of informa-tion about people I don’t know. Its one ofthose situations where you tend to openyourself up to other people and walking forseveral days is one of those situations.

After you have finished is it something nowyou value?

I personally don’t think I ever discoveredthat. You know you work through a block ofproblems at a time and you come to somekind of satisfactory conclusion. All the peoplewho helped you come to those conclusionsare a special kind of friend.

The kind of friend you have on pilgrimageis a different quality because of the determi-nation you both have. On pilgrimage it comesnaturally that you think about your life andyou discuss it with others. The friends youhave are different because of that.

What did you bring back?

Well I suppose I always carried around lots ofWales with me depending upon my age. When I was young it was climbing Wales, Iknew where every cliff was and I supposethen I had an industrial map of Wales and theformer Wales and what it did to me was openup Wales in the middles ages. The medievalperiod had always seemed a mystery andvague and now I’m absolutely fascinated byit. So my image of Wales has changed. Walesis a palimpsest but some of the layers arericher than others.

I got a great sense of the beauty of Wales. Itgave me an understanding of Welsh peopleand Welsh thinking as well as a strong senseof community. I don’t just mean the localcommunity but other religions have pilgrim-age, it isn’t exclusive to Christianity or to anyreligion but it's open to all and so there’s asense of fellowship.

M: Its probably about the sense of spaceinside of me. I was theoretically the organiserso there was quite a lot of negotiating andpaper work and checking upon things as wewent around. Sometimes it got very fraughtand stressful and sometimes I got stressedwith other people. I badgered and harassedthem and got bad tempered but what I thinkI came away with was this feeling of spaceinside. Once you know it's there it's alwaysgoing to be there. You can think, well I canalways get back to that. I think the other thingyou come away with, and it's to do with whatAlan was talking about, about communicat-ing to other people, because its easy to com-municate with people when you are walking.You can get along with people who youwould normally disagree with quite violently.If it gets too heavy you can walk for a bit andjust let it cool off. It’s a very inclusive com-munity, a pilgrimage, and you have to get onwith people who want to do things very dif-ferently. You have to learn patience and toler-ance and you have to learn how to cope withpeople who walk a lot slower than you do,you have to learn have to cope with peoplewho walk a lot faster than you do, and youhave to cope with people who want to be sobloody awkward. I’m not very good at thatso it was quite a challenge. I’m not verypatient so I had to learn to be more patient. Idon’t think I’m learning very well but I try.This is obviously one of the important thingsabout learning to live in a community, islearning that you have got to be patient withthe way other people go about things. You trywith that but the most important thing wasthe space you get inside yourself I think you

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get that from going through the difficult bitsas well as the pleasant bits.

I think walking for me has always been atherapy anyway. I could well believe that lotsof people who don’t do it very often findwalking in itself takes you away from the nor-mal pace in life. If you travel ten miles in tenminutes on a motor way and spend all daywalking ten miles on a pilgrimage it reallychanges your outlook. You realise that youdon’t always have to be in a hurry and youcan take it easy. I agree with what other peo-ple have said about the community spirit thatdevelops. But equally within a pilgrimagegroup there is the opportunity you get foryour own time and your own space. Youchange partnerships and get into smallgroups and its quite easy to spend a wholehour not talking to anybody. One interestingthing to come out of for me was when I firstsaw the itinerary. I couldn’t image anybodydoing all this. I thought I could do reasonablybig chunks of it here and there but I found itincredible that some people wanted to do thewhole lot. It is quite humbling to think we canachieve an awful lot if you set out to do it.

I was amazed at what the land told me thatit hadn’t told me before. What was once agreen field had now become a stage of historyand drama and life that had gone on beforewhich you quite innocently passed as a nor-mal field. I was quite overawed by what theactual land and the walk revealed to me thatI had been able to pass. Because I walked forten days and then stopped and went back andwalked again and stopped and went to walkagain I found the relationships I made withpeople were quite lasting. It was a couple ofdays and then you met up again. It was likerenewing old friendships and yet they wereonly a few days old.

I think there’s a sense of inner sanctuaryabout finding out about your self. Its also aneye opening, making you aware of the world

out there and what you had not come acrossbefore. For me, as not a particularly Christianperson, I think I have increased my spiritualawareness by coming across a side to life Ihad not really experienced before and gettingto terms with that.

Quite seriously, something I have alreadymentioned, the beauty and the attraction ofthe countryside around us. I’ve been walking,to paraphrase, to parts of Wales that othermethods of transport can’t reach. I found thatfascinating and it did leave me with a sensethat I wanted to see a hell of a lot more of it.The other thing that did come out of it, not somuch in a spiritual sense, because I’m notreally pilgrim material, but one of the thingsthat did come through very strongly when wewere walking 8,10,12, 15 miles a day was thatapart from the pilgrim side of it, that was theway that people moved around. They didthose sort of distances, did a days work andthen they did the walk back again. And Ireflected on this on the basis if we can’t parkour car outside our front door and park itagain outside of our place of work we feelhard done by. So it did give me some sort ofsense what had gone before in that respect.

M: Now Derek of course did an indepen-dent pilgrimage of his own as well becausewe had got across South Wales as far as Tenbyand I had to go back to the day job. Derekwalked on to St. David’s. Now, why did youdo this, Derek, other than your legs wouldn’tstop?

Derek: I said early on that at my age therewasn't a chance of me trekking across Waleson my own. But one of the attractions of thiswas that it was organised, we didn’t have towalk in a circle, where you have to come backto your car or catch a non-existent countrybus. It was organised and you walked in astraight line from A to b and there was trans-port at each end and that to me was valuable.I said to myself I shall take advantage of this,

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this isn’t going to happen again in my life-time. And then I felt I might as well go thewhole hog and do the last three days and thenI could say I had walked across the whole ofSouth Wales. It was vanity for me - on top ofthat I lost a stone. I thought a walk fromLlantarnam to St. David’s was an appropriatejourney, that was the real reason I did it.

Something I forgot to add that made thewhole thing and that was Maddy’s stories.She made everything so alive and so wonder-ful it was just a pleasure to walk with her andto soak up all the things she made it betterthan any story book, any film.

M: Robin is working on a route from St.David’s as well. What is the thinking - is thereany sense of pilgrimage with it?

Robin: Oh well because it was the originalplace to go, it was twice to St. David’s andonce to Rome. It grew out of the fact that myfamily had gone down there and I couldn’t goand meet them and so I thought why don’t Iwalk down there. Then I thought well youcan’t walk the they used to go because mostof it is covered by motorway concrete now solets work out something that takes in theBrecon Beacons that runs east west. So it wasthen how to work out how to get from one lotof mountains to the next. It's been three yearsnow and I’ve walked chunks of it and I havenow the line of a route. I'm hoping to do thatin the next few months.

M: I would just like to add a few wordsabout sustainability and tourism, gre e ntourism as this is obviously something thathas been very much in our minds as weplanned the route. We hope this will becomea permanent route so that people can share inthe kind of experiences we’ve had as well ofcourse of having new experiences. We havehad to think about things like way marking,stiling, how we deal with local authoritieswho are reluctant to invest in extending theirnetwork of public rights of way. A couple of

authorities have got a particularly bad recordin this respect while some authorities inWales have got extremely good records. Buteven if you have got a good record frequentlywhat it boils down to is tourism and sustain-able tourisM: The kind of tourism they wantis people backpacking through the country-side and using resources locally rather dri-ving in the people carrier with suitcases ofstuff from the supermarket in Birmingham orwherever. So we feel that a pilgrimage as wellas its religious spiritual connotations is alsoan aspect of green tourism, sustainabletourism to the extent that one of the ways wewant to modify the route is to take it wayfrom heavily walked footpaths and sensitiveenvironmental areas. This is something thatSteve and I were doing some work on lastsummer, trying to get the routes. We had orig-inally taken the Offa's Dyke path along theClwydian edge, a glorious walk but desper-ately over walked and very badly eroded sowe don’t feel happy about walking it. W e areworking on an alternative route going downthe Vale of Clwyd. This route has got a lotgoing for it although it's not as spectacularscenically, but its still very beautiful. It goesalong a medieval pilgrimage route which wefound out by accident and it goes past somegorgeous old churches. It takes you down thevalley of the River Clwyd along one of thesefootpaths which the Denbighshire CountyCouncil has been way marking because theythink it's important to attract people to dothat kind of walk.

Is there a sense in which avoiding a stressedenvironment is easier in a group? When peo-ple are in dialogue with each other, as theywalk, they demand perhaps less by way of ascenic setting.

Well it's not that the Vale of Clwyd is notattractive but it’s attractive in a different way.In many ways it makes a better pilgrimageroute. The Clwydian Range is more or lesspure scenery with a couple of iron age hill

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forts and going down the Vale of Clwyd youare going down a much more intricate, amuch more people-made landscape.Obviously the Clwydian Range is a people-made landscape but going down the Valeit ismuch easier to see how people have inter-acted with their landscape. Yo u ' re goingthrough a more settled area and you aregoing past some particularly spectacularmedieval churches. You are partly on the pil-grimage route which took you from Holywellover to Gwytherin, where Winifred recoveredfrom having her head cut off. She retired intothe hills and founded a convent, it's in thehills south of Conway and there is a medievalpilgrimage route that goes from Holywell toGwytherin. You would walk on that part ofthe way and then you would walk on themedieval or rather post medieval route whichwent down from Holy Well to St David’s viaCorwen. It takes you through a landscapeand settlements which are of enormous inter-est where you have got a lot of religious his-tory. That's what we have been focusing onwith this particular route.

What about resources for the walkers?

We only got into double figures on the firstfew days when we were walking fro mLlantarnam up to Penrhys. We had a lot ofhospitality from church groups and individ-ual clergy on the way. We also stayed withfriends and used bed and breakfast and someof the group used youth hostels. Some of theroute is very well served by accommodation;some areas you would at the moment find itd i fficult to find b& b's sufficiently closetogether to make a day's walk feasible for agroup. You may be talking about thirty tothirty five miles between suitable points.What we would hope if we can get this upand running as a long distance footpath isthat it would generate a demand for accom-modation. Again this feeds into the greentourism sustainability issues because some ofthe areas where the accommodation is most

scarce are some of the areas where the Welshhave been hit hardest by the agriculturaldepression. Putting up tourists is one of theways out of the agricultural crisis and backpacking tourist are particularly usefulbecause we can’t carry stuff with us. We haveto have sandwiches made for us for the nextday etc. so there is more scope for catering fortourist needs if you are backpacking.

It is never going to be the bread - I don’tthink any local economy can sustain itselfonly on tourism except in very unusual cases.But it puts the jam on the bread and it meansthat local communities can survive whereaswithout it they would give up because thereis simply not enough money in their agricul-tural economy at the moment. So again wethink this could potentially be quite animportant part of what we are doing, revital-ising depressed areas and complementingother schemes in those areas.

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Interviewees: David Attwell (DA),North Cornwall District Council,Heritage coast and countryside ser-vice, Reverend Geoffrey Pengelly(RP) & Mr. Walter Polglaze (WP),Chairman of the North PetherwinParish Council.

Questions are presented in blue text while addi -tions from the author will be given in italics.Additional notes at the end are from discussionswith the local school headmistress Mrs. C.Williams who was unable to attend the interviewsession.

Introduction

This project was one of a number to conserve,t h rough community based initiatives, thestone crosses and ancient wells of NorthCornwall. These monuments represent a dis-tinctive contribution to the landscape and aregenerally considered to be well regarded bythe county’s residents. Their condition in anumber of cases, the North Petherwin Wellbeing an example, offers the chance for acombination of conservation initiatives thatexpress the interests of the community orparts of it. The crosses and wells also offerpoints of interest to the visitor.

The Interview

RP The idea of the project to restore the vil-lage’s Holy well, if I remember rightly, wasfirst mooted around the parochial churc hcouncil. Isabelle Stevens thought it would bea lovely idea to have the holy well restoredfor the millennium and from that I thinkremember rightly, David correct me, we then,in collaboration with Mr. Peter Luckin, who isone of the churchwardens who got in touchwith you (DA). Meanwhile I had brought thematter up at Hampsel at their parish councilmeeting with Walter (WP), and that’s how wegot our first group of volunteers. The churchcontributed towards the work and then theParish Council and the school. It's very mucha community project. Involving all the parish,it was everybody from the village.

Can you now describe the site itself and whatis was like before the restoration?

WP We have lived here for six years now andwe knew there was a well because it wasmarked on the map.

When we first moved here we went downto look at it and we had gone down two orthree times and we had never found it. It wasso overgrown that nobody could ever find itif they went down there to have a look.

Of course people knew it was there before,people like Mr Hawk and the Danteons andMr Gause and there are people in the parishwho remember being baptised with waterfrom the Holy well. But it was completelyo v e rg rown. So this meant digging downseven feet into the well metre by metre. Thispart of the project involved carrying out theexcavation and the initial clearance with Mr.Gause from the farm who manages some ofthe land the well is on. Michelle James fromEnglish Heritage was also involved.Following that we applied for a grant fromsomething called the Cornwall Landscape

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Holy Wellrestoration project group:North Petherwin,Cornwall

P roject for funding towards the physicalrestoration of the well and we were able tocount as contributions in kind the labourand materials. We also had slate donatedf rom the community and the landownerdonated stone

DA We then applied for grants from theSacred Land Project and some funding fromthe Parish Council some funding from theschool and some funding from the CornwallRural Council which enabled us to involvethe school and the wider community in theproject. The funds help pay for Joanna Tagneywho is a musician and storyteller who wasinvolved in helping to make the banners(these were used in the procession by school chil -dren when the well was blessed in a service on thecompletion of the restoration) Joanna Mattingly,an expert on the medieval church inCornwall, did an investigation into thec h u rch here in North Petherwin whichhelped us to formulate ideas thro u g hReverend Pingelly for a service which wouldbe a culmination of the work..

RP This service was actually close to thePertronius festival service as this church isdedicated to Saint Pertronius and it wasdecided to hold it on the Saturday nearest tothat. We had the Archdeacon of Bodmin comealong to do the rededication, of course theschool who made the banners for the proces-sion , and we had a joyous service and thenprocessed from the church to the Holy wellfor the rededication and the children did a lit-tle story about that followed by some prayers.After that we recessed to the village hall forrefreshments and it involved the whole of theparish, everyone was there, there were overtwo hundred people there as well as severalpeople came from outside the parish com-pletely.

Can you explain what it was that gelled withthe community that made them get up and dothis project?

WP It is written in the history book here thatit had been traditional for people to havebeen christened with water from the HolyWell. We said that's a marvellous traditionand that is what stuck in my mind. I think theidea to continue the tradition stirred in manypeople’s minds particularly the older parish-ioners. The older families that have been herelonger especially thought how lovely torevive an old tradition that sort of took themback to their North Petherwin roots. It gavethe parish a focus which struck a cord inmany peoples minds.

One day we walked down the path goingdown to the well, this was before we boughtthe land, (WP is part owner of the site) and saidto ourselves ‘you know that you can feel thatpeople had walked down here before’. One ofmy nephews has investigated the lane as hada local countryside ranger and they both saidthe path has got to be at least a thousandyears old due to the species present but onlyour part of the path is still there, the rest hasbeen destroyed. It would have been beautifulif you could have gone right down that path.

RP I think because it involved the school somany people were bitten by the idea. Yes Ithink the school excited the parish.

Has the relationship between the site and thecommunity now changed, is it more talkedabout and more regularly visited?

WP Well there are lots of people walkingdown who never walked down there before.T h e re is always things Peter (the farmer)objects to, people leaving these ribbons in thebushes (there was, still is, an old custom to leaveparts of your clothing at a healing or holy well fora number of reason, usually these would be nomore than small pieces of cloth) so there arechurchgoers and non-churchgoers who godown there who feel that this place has somesignificance to them.

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RP We have also had a number of baptismsin church since the restoration of the well andwe have always had water brought up fromthe well for them and that will continue.

WP The reason it had fallen into disrepairwas just over change of hands I think becauseGordon Snell (a villager) said it was his job toclean it out when he was a boy. His father saidyou have got to clean this out every year andhe did. Whenever they sold it, it was a lot ofyears ago, the next people obviously didn’tcarry that tradition forward and that’s howthe well had disappeared. It had probablybeen silting for up 50 years.

Apart from the physical restoration werethere other objectives of the project?

RP Oh, I think conserving something fromhistory and the well was a very importantpart of the history of the parish it wasn’t justan isolated well.

DA I think it was bringing it back into thefabric of the church because it was so much apart of the church. It was bringing it back intothe building of the church through the wateralthough it is separated from the church in afield. Because the tradition had beenneglected I think the parish re-discoveredthemselves. It was something that parentscould pass on to their children, somethingthat had been slipping out of view and theyre-kindled by this project.

How if at all do you think this project aids thespiritual needs and sustainability of the com-munity?

DA I think one of the things that came out ofthe exercise, and it’s a spiritual thing, wasthat people came together regardless of reli-gious beliefs. They all came to one place andhad a fantastic day. I think arising out of thewell project was a renewed interest in ParishPaths and other things of interest. The well

p roject brought people in the communitytogether for a physical and spiritual eventand it prompted people to look at other issuesthat before that they had not regarded as spir-itual.

WP I had never thought of it that way. Nowwe have gone through five years with havingthe parish paths, which I had always been infavour of and then they accepted it, so maybethat could have been a contributory factor, Idon’t know - that people came together as aresult of that project, because the parish Pathspartnership is really good.

Does the site have any relationship with thewider community - is it visited by tourists forexample?

WP If we give it a higher profile in the church- presently we’ve got reference to it - if wehighlighted it people would go to see. Visitorsdo come to the church. Mind you it must besaid we don’t get a lot of tourists in this area.

We’re not on the coast and so we don’t getthe tourists. We get a few.

DA There are a number of books and publi-cations on Holy wells that list NorthPetherwin and I think if I’d looked in severalguide books up until fairly recently, it wouldhave proved damning of Petherwin Well asthey would have arrived to find it derelict. Iwould hope now that those arriving canexpect to find something that will be pleas-antly surprising.

What were the benefits of the project to theenvironment and to the community? As Iunderstand there were two groups, one whodid the work and the rest who celebrated thatrestoration?

DA Speaking from my point of view it was agreat deal of fun to re-discover the well andrecruiting the group to do the work and to

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celebrate that. There was a talk and a tour ofthe medieval church and everyone was fasci-nated by these. What I also thought was veryimportant was that the group came togetherso well, there was a sense that they wanted toget it done.

RP One side to that, that’s supplementary,is that the congregation wanted to have a cel-ebration each year rather than just for the dayof the restoration. This will help to keep ittidy, if you know people wanted a celebra-tion each year.

The service was the largest one you had in theParish for some time wasn't it?

RP Except for the Christingle service onChristmas eve, yes it probably would be, OhI’m delighted, absolutely thrilled. It took peo-ple here back to the Christian roots, the beliefwe had in the Celtic Saints. St. Pertroniuscame here and established a small cell withinthe community. Quite likely they gatheredaround the well, it goes back centuries, itrekindled people’s appreciation of history.Where we are now, why we are here, and soon and the importance of conserving that.

WP Before the present church was here,there was probably, and this is from the his-tory I’ve read, a wooden church on the waydown to the well. But on the experience of theproject, you do the work with other people,how can you describe that, a rewarding expe-rience.

DA When you think about it there was acommunity pulling together.

WP Yes, you were working together. That’swhy I enjoy living in North Petherwin, youcould do something new with the communityevery day of the week.

There have been lots of little initiatives likethe well story occurring all over the county,

to conserve local distinctiveness, and collec-tively they add. Do you see doing these smallprojects, in your backyard so to speak, as hav-ing a wider significance than just what it maymean to your local community or to yourlocal environment?

RP I think, is it a part of the sort of overallneed for greater awareness of the need of con-servation both of the countryside and ourheritage and so on? And I think it could be.Also, is it focusing attention on that and mak-ing people more aware of the importance ofcaring for these places and the significance ofthem in their lives? Again I think it could wellbe that.

I’ve been keen on conservation ever since Iwas a boy but today so many more people arekeen on it as well.

WP It's local, that’s why people getinvolved locally. If our economy changed forthe worse, for instance, all the elements ofsustainability are here, whether they are incities I doubt, but certainly you wouldn’thave any problem if the economy was in direstraits, people here can get together and put ameal on and house two hundred people in aminute, sort of thing. All of those elementsare within the community. Its very close here,look how many people will be going down toWalter Hall today for example.

Who is Walter?

WP Walter should have been at this meetingbut he was helping with digging a trench yes-terday and the trench collapsed on him.

RP and people are going down to see him.I mean I’m sure it happens in many places intowns but I think it’s more extenuatedextended in these villages; we have retainedthat sense of community.

Would you say that that your relationship

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with the physical environment has influencedthat retention or is it just a question of scale,being a smaller community?

RP I think that these have something to dowith it but I would say I think the Christianheritage of these places has something to dowith it as well. OK you might say that ‘youwould say that, you’re the vicar’, but I dothink it has, because a considerable numberof people that do get involved do come froma Christian background. I think that has madea difference and it is a factor that has to berecognised.

I would also say that a factor is that it’s asmall community, people know a lot morepeople (meaning as a percentage of the whole)and through marriages. In a population of,what, 700 you are going to know people bet-ter than if you’re in a population of 7000 or70,000, that’s obvious.

DA Underlining that is that land basedindustries have been the main industryalthough I think things are slightly changingnow but it meant that things happened in anda round North Petherwin, people haven’tbeen going to other places for work so much.

I think if you spoke to most people they arevery aware of their surroundings but it’sbecause it’s a place where people know eachother - things like the WI are thriving. WalterHall didn’t stand on the top of his house andtell everybody he’s got a cracked rib buteveryone knows a trench fell in on him.

RP We are almost saying, aren’t we, to acertain extent the rural community, particu-larly those connected with the land, are verymuch an important part in maintaining thiscommunity spirit with other people comingin but the core seems to be land-based.

WP But I’m not land-based am I, really?

RP No, but if you think of the things thathave happened in the village and the percent-age of the people who support them that haveconnections with the land they are high, butits not exclusive.

WP Most of the people are connected towhat's going on except for the new estate. It’sa funny thing but if you look at the way thehouses are built, all the new houses are builtin one place and we haven’t had one thingfrom them.

DA Do you think that’s because people feelself contained?

RP It’s possible.

WP I don’ t know, but they never, withexceptions, with few exceptions. . . If we havean event we get a third of the village there butpeople from the new estates are neverincluded. They are always in the two-thirdswith the odd exception.

RP and it isn’t just the church or the chapelactivities it’s also the case if there’s a villagehall event or a school event.

WP That is generally true. Of course theschool is another huge connection.

DA Its interesting isn’t it, because I knowMrs Hawks said when someone new cameinto the village the WI went and gave her awelcome pack and said ‘these things are here,come along and join us, and this is where theplay area is,’ and they get a negative responsefrom the people you are describing so its notthat some of us are not going out there andtrying.

RP We do try as well, as a church we takethe magazine to them and welcome them andsay ‘well these are the things going on.’

WP It’s got all the news that’s happening

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you don’t have to go to the church. It’s a verycheap method of finding out what’s happen-ing and yet there are some new people whohave just come who are refusing the maga-zine. They will never be part of the commu-nity.

DA Why do you think that is? You just saidabout them being all in one area.

WP Well, I wonder if it’s something to dowith them all living in new houses. All thesepeople live in new houses and other peoplelive in old houses and if I go to an old house Iget the feel of what's there before.

Are you saying new houses don’t represent atradition but they’re just something that’sjust placed on the landscape but old houseshave a history and that they’re part of thelandscape?

Obviously every house has to be new at somestage but if you’re coming to it knowing it hasa history as opposed to going to a housewhich is as new to the area as you are, is therea difference?

Is this related to what you were talking aboutbeing land-based, it may not be the case thateverybody is economically attached to theland but the community operates around aland-based culture still?

WP We are living in what used to be a farm-house, and there are other farmhouses thatare now private houses and some that are stillattached to the farms, all those people Iwould say are generally part of the commu-nity.

RP Are they?

WP Oh absolutely, against the new houseswere people aren’t. There's a feeling in thehouse we joined because we took it over fromthe Tippets and in a way we carried on some

of the traditions when the Tippets were therelike coming along to the church.

What you appear to be saying is that if youmove into an old house your response to yourenvironment is going to be different than ifyou move into a new house that had not be anestablished part of that environment or com-munity.

WP I think that's quite interesting. I devel-oped ten houses in the area and of the newones built nobody takes part in the commu-nity.

RP Other people take part in school eventsif they have children.

DA I think this is maybe why the idea tocontinue to celebrate the well each year willwork because it gives people the opportunityto come along and take part.

WP I wonder if people get a feeling whenthey go into a house, whether they like it ornot, you get a feeling when you go into achurch, but when you go into a place that’snewly built you may not get any feeling at all.

RP I doubt if that excuses you. After allplaces are what you make them to a certainextent, but also, to be fair, because one isn’ttrying to draw a distinction or a divisionbetween those that live in new houses andthose that don’t. We are just observing thingsbut perhaps people are moving into the com-munity who haven’t had a connection orroots or particular interest, or work some-where else. To be fair to them why shouldthey necessarily come to the village hall,come to church whatever? Or they may havecome from a place where there wasn’t a greatcommunity so it’s almost alien to them so it’snot their fault.

I can think of one or two people, from wewill say the new estates, who I have had con-

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tact with and who made contact because theyhave an interest in an old building or archi-t e c t u re, not necessary as a Christian butbecause they have an interest in the oldchurch building and that has been a point ofconnection.

There may be an economic reason: I canafford the new house but I can’t afford the oldhouse.

DA That doesn’t explain why people buildwhen they get an opportunity to.

P e rhaps herein lies a challenge for theparish council and the like. For if you repre-sent the parish how do you get peopleinvolved? It’s very difficult, but how do youdo it as a parish council?

From what you have been saying here itwould be a very good experience if the parishcouncil do an appraisal or some sort of assess-ment of what people thought about theParish.

WP I would love to do something like that butthis is all new to me.

The conversation was left at this point and hope -fully the Parish Council will look seriously at theappraisal idea. Two further people spoke, althoughwere not recorded, these are given here as extranotes to this interview.

Discussions with Joanna Tagney,community artist and performer. Sheworked with children and adults on thebanners for the celebration.

Joanna Tagney lives in North Cornwall and worksin the performance arts as both performer andprop/set producer which includes costume design.Her work involves her in the development andsupport of celebration events and activities withlocal communities. Her particular interests arebased around the subjects of where you live and

how you are connected to those places. She believesthese are especially interesting in the light of theexperience of rural communities which are not inher view so dominated by the mass media culturethat are readily identified with big urban land -scapes. This is not to say that these landscapes donot have importance in these matters and she does,for example, believe that it is good for young peo -ple especially, to go off from their homes in therural areas to university etc. but laments thatoften they do not return. Without that return andin and out migration she considers new ideas andexperiences that could enhance both the environ -ment and the life of the community are lacking.

She tries to combat what she would regard as apassive involvement with the enviro n m e n tthrough the promotion of much more positiveschemes which demand a deeper involvement withthem. For her, processes in place and celebration ofthese processes, can project culture into the land -scape. Projects like the well scheme, she believes,give people a sense of identity and add to their sus -tainability and thus to a local and regional dis -tinctiveness.

For Joanna ‘sacred’ goes beyond religion. It isabout the full wonder of land and ourselves in it.This was the contribution she felt she made to theWell project, working with both school childrenand parents.

On a more personal basis she stated that she feltthat the well has been regarded as a special placewhere the mundaneness of people’s lives can takeon the extraordinary. She sees the well as a markerof important places that connects the past with thepresent and it is this that makes up that extraordi -nariness.

She also stated, however, that people don't haveto be aware of the past to celebrate the site andmaybe that celebration could take place every year(an issue discussed in the full interview). By doingso the site and the celebration would become thesense of place in both past and present.

Finally she reminded us that although she hadspoken of young people quite a lot it should beremembered that old people always knew it wasthere and this ensured its regeneration.

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Discussions with Chris Williams, HeadTeacher, North Petherwin School.

Most of the discussion centred on the impact ofinvolving children in projects. Although there waslittle discussion of specifically sacred land, as wastrue of the main interview, she made the point thatthis was a very religious community and it need beremembered that in such communities the sacredis often not seen as something beyond but a part ofthe everyday. A way of comprehending this is byway of a project which is seen as a special event ina special place by both the children and her.

She felt that children had an immediate inputinto the project. Adults might be planning some -thing for months but the children need a veryimmediate and practical involvement and that thiscan add to the freshness and vitality for everyone.She thought children like being part of somethingbigger than just the thing which happens withother children or through school. They enjoyedworking on the project with adults (childre ninvolved ranged from 4-11) and playing their roleas part of a community. Overall the children, shethought, like doing something concrete, that'simportant but then so is celebrating what's beendone. The children and community do gain beyondenjoying the event and especially the children gainfrom non-school activity or school activity in anon-school situation and environment.

Children, she stated, reduce a project to a sim -plified process and they can cut through overtlycomplex issues with simple solutions which bringsabout co-operation between the age groups. Forexample the banner-making was seen by them as apractical issue and that representing the 'Saints',who are special people, was a practical problemthat needed to be overcome. The older childrenespecially recognised the intangible values of theproject. But equally practical problems give theman input into the tangible.

The project worked because the adults helped thechildren rather than directed them. The childrenrecognised the holistic nature of the project andwere especially fascinated by the medieval guilds.The story that each guild had an input into theland (i.e. owned land and livestock etc.) was espe -

cially interesting to them. It was also the chil -dren's input that ensured that they had the bestservice that the church has seen for years.

The talk by Joanna Mattingly, an expert inCornish medieval churches, to the children wasonly partly successful but did help get the parentsinvolved because their children were. Thereappeared to be general agreement that the processof celebration should carry on and become part ofthe life of the community.

Chris personally gained from the pro j e c tbecause she felt it helped to keep the school andcommunity together (the school is two miles out -side the village). It is important for her and thechildren that the school does not become separatedand isolated and that contact with the church aspart of the community is maintained.

Finally she felt life should be about celebrationin all sorts of forms and that the project hadopened the prospect of a yearly celebration. Thisshe felt could be restructured and be made to bepart of the year's cycle just as with the seasons.

The school is always looking at these kind ofthemes.

These projects are a levelling process in the com -munity. The difficulty today in the school is thatthere is not enough slack to be able to involve theschool in extra activities and with no slack it’s dif -ficult to develop celebration of being human ratherthan acquiring human knowledge.

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Jamyang Buddhist Centre is a Buddhist commu -nity in South London which offers a range ofcourses on Buddhist teachings and practice. Thecentre also leads retreats as well as offer its facili -ties for the benefit of the wider community. Thecommunity are from a Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

Sacred Land have in the past supported the cen -tre by producing a design for a sacred garden aspart of the centre and is currently supporting anarts project at the centre.

Interviewees: Robin Bath (RB),Trustee of the centre; Alison Murdoch(AM), Director of the centre; GrantOsman (GO), Artist-in-Residence;Dave Benn (D), Bookshop Manager

Can one of you describe the group whoworks at the centre?

AM. There's actually hundreds of people whowork at the centre. As Director I am responsi-ble for fund-raising and overall development.We also have a lot of volunteers who help runthe centre. We usually have three or four res-idential volunteers at any one time on a workprogramme basis. Then we have other peoplewho come by for half a day or the hour orwho come to one of our residential workschemes. Finally the legal responsibility of thecentre rests with the trustees.

Can you describe the site and the projectsaround it?

RB. Perhaps Alison could give us an overallview of what it was like when she first dis-c o v e red it because that’s really quite animportant aspect in how we saw the place ini-tially. The vision of it being a potential centrefor us as a Buddhist group developed fromthis. And as I understand it Alison it was youwho cycled past it one day.

AM. Yes that’s right and it had been unoc-cupied for five years before that.

Can you describe what it is?

AM. We are sitting here in a Vi c t o r i a nCourthouse, which is now a Tibetan Buddhistcentre. Our group has existed for twenty oneyears, was first a group of meditators meetingin someone's house and then acquired a semi-detached house in Finsbury Park, NorthLondon. I think it was about 1992 when ourspiritual director who is a Tibetan teachercalled Lama Zopa Rinpoche said it was timeto look for a larger centre. I was one of thepeople that he asked to do that and I live inSouth London near here and so one day Icycled past and saw the building. At the timeMother Teresa's group were trying to buy itbut that fell through and we then got lockedinto a two and half year process to buy thebuilding. Our Tibetan teacher, whose guid-ance I think we would all accept wholeheart-edly, said he thought this was the perfectbuilding for us, and so somehow we pur-chased it. So to some extent we were guidedby him, and to some extent we were building-led because we had such a struggle acquiringthe building versus various developers. Allkinds of thing happened. We never reallydevised a business plan and hadn't lookedaround after we began the process to acquirethe place. We simply knew: this is the build-ing, and we are going to turn this buildinginto a Buddhist facility.

From the very beginning there was a verypassionate relationship with the building. In a

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JamyangBuddhist Centre:Lambeth, London

lot of ways the building itself, with the guid-ance from our teacher has shaped what actu-ally happens within it. It wasn't a case of uslooking for a courthouse to turn into aBuddhist centre, looking for a building withthirty two rooms, a cell block and a high secu-rity courtyard. It was a case of us having aconnection with the building, and then oncewe actually acquired it, we devised a practicalway of making it work.

Robin asked me to say something about thetime when we first visited the building. WhenI spoke on the phone to the estate agent I saidI know it’s been sold to a developer, but tellme a little about it anyway. He said "Well, youcome in through the lobby then there's a bigcentral space, with rooms off the sides, andthen there’s a cell block. I said "It sounds per-fect, exactly what we want", and he said "I'mreally sorry but it is sold." So I asked him tophone me if anything changed, and it wentfrom there. When we actually came into thebuilding for the first time, I think there werethree of us, and it had been empty for abouttwo and a half years. It was completelyb o a rded up, very wet, damp, dark, andunheated, but we walked into the centralspace, which was the courtroom and immedi-ately got a sense of the potential. Jokes weremade that this was built in 1869 but it had towait a 130 years to find its true purpose; it hasbeen such a good match from that point ofview.

There was an architect in the early dayswho said "This is a wonderful building forvolunteers. You’ll find the more you stripback the more the better this building will be"and that's been our experience. The horriblegrey paint, the barbed wire, the institutionalglass partitioning of the thing could bestripped back to something that is very clean,clear, strong, practical, welcoming and every-thing else. Robin, you might like to add to that.

RB. Well, it leads my thoughts back to theparty we had to celebrate the potential of

buying the building, a full year before itbecame ours.

AM. I always thought it was like blowingthe trumpets outside the walls of Jericho.That’s just what it felt like. There was an enor-mous amount of prayer, prayer ceremoniesgoing on all over the world. We had so manypeople involved in the purchase. There wasalso a petition among the people that livedlocally and every councillor on the planningcommittee was on our side, so if you wantedto look at it from the spiritual point of view,there was an enormous amount of prepara-tion for our moving in here.

RB. Yes there was. In a fairly abstract wayI've got another comment and this is a bitbizarre, but having been the maintenance per-son of the smaller property, my first thoughtwhen I came to see this building was absolutehorror. It was partly the state of it being sodamp. I looked at this vast place and thoughtthere are enough jobs to do here for a century.I confess I had a completely sleepless night.I've never told you that, but after the first timeI visited, I had nightmares the whole night. Idon't know if our teacher might have pickedup on this but the first task he gave me was todo a specific puja to bring about a newchange of energy in the place. He gave mesome specific tasks: to take a mirror I think itwas one for the main entrance of the building,for the basement area, for all of the rooms. Iwas also to go into these spaces and offerprayers. For me, this changed my feeling,knowing the history of the building which wehaven’t mentioned yet. It had been a highsecurity courtroom, a site for IRA trials.

AM. It was the last high security court offirst instance for central London, so from 1980to 1990 it had all the sort of terrorist commit-tals, no not committals, but first hearings hap-pening here. So the IRA, the UVF, the Rasta,everything; people remember the road beingclosed off, helicopters overhead, marksmen

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on the roof. We've got a walkway on the roof,huge great metal gates to the courtyard, andanybody coming through, came in a metalcage and was encased in these tiny cells. Themain courtroom was lined with lead againstbombings, a generator outside in case of apower cuts and bullet proof glass, which westill have across the back of the building. So itwas very intense, and in fact there were a fewpeople, a couple of people I remember specif-i c a l l y, one of them was an ex-pro b a t i o nworker who came to me and said "Look thiswas a real mistake look I having terriblenightmares about this place we will not beable to turn the energy around." But I think itwas the genius of John, the venerable JohnFeuille who was a resident monk at the time,who said that we should start with the cellblock so where as the cell block could havebecome this pariah, the black hole of thewhole thing, it actually started it off. Do youremember stripping those doors? Robin wasvery involved in that, there were nine layersof grey paint on the cell doors.

Another great powerful thing that hap-pened is that within seven months of acquir-ing the building we hosted the Kalachakrainitiation by a Lama called Kirti TsenshabRinpoche.

Can you explain what that is?

AM Kirti Tsenshab Rinpoche is one of theteachers of the Dalai Lama who is the leaderof our particular type of our Buddhism. AKalachakra initiation is a ceremony basedaround a very complex presentation on howtime works. It’s part of the Tibetan Tantra tra-dition (if I say that a lot of people might mis-understand because they think of the IndianTantra - a ceremony based around a sacredtext). This is a very rare and special ceremonythat lasts two days and people came from allover the world to be a part of it and the hugeaim, purpose, is to promote world peace. Sowe actually had a ceremony from the build-

ing and for me that was the turning point. Ifelt after that any remnants of the old atmos-phere had gone.

DB I noticed a strange thing. There was amandala (a map/design of the universe, often cre -ated with coloured sands at ceremonies and thenswept away symbolising the impermanence ofeverything) at the exhibition which was sweptup, called a Kalachakra mandala. A mandalais a palace in our terminology; there are manydifferent interpretations of the word; a man-dala is a pictorial representation. Afterwardsthe Kalachakra mandala was swept up andthrown into the river at Lambeth palace. Nowtwo or three years later we got this building.Then another Tibetan group decided that theywould make a peace garden just down theroad and of course there’s Samye Dzong(another Buddhist Centre). So I don’t know ifthat mandala was the cause of it all Tibetanplaces springing up around here.

You are one of a number of Buddhist centresin this area, is this becoming the centre ofTibetan Buddhism in the country?

AM I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s the cen-tre in the country but there is a flourishingactivity here that has no particular logic.

You talked a little about the use of the build-ing could you explain how different groupsuse or have access to it?

AM Are you thinking of the Buddhist spiri-tual community or the local geographicalcommunity?

Both, perhaps you would like to explain howthe two relate.

RB Leading on from what we said about theinitial need and the impetus to try and get thebuilding ready, we weren’t ready to offerteachings for a while. Except we did havecore teaching sessions which ran all the time

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and from which there was never a break.There were things that went on all the time,but in a sense we held back, thinking thatwhen the building was a bit tidier we couldopen our door to a greater number of people.That seems to have worked really wonder-fully does it?

AM. We had a constantly increasing num-ber of people coming here. We try variousways to be open to local people, and open tomore people in general, through open days,and advertising in publications like Time Outand Hot Tickets. This always amuses mebecause it is much easier for us to do thesetypes of things than a Christian organisation.

We run quite a complex education pro-gramme, there is usually events happeninghere a minimum of five or six days a week.We run evening classes at 7.30 and a lot of thetime we have two running at the same time;then we run weekend events and workshops.We have a two year course on Ti b e t a nBuddhism and have just finished the first one.It’s in six modules and is designed to fit intowestern education systems. So we see verymuch as an educational organisation with arange of activity from very ‘soft’ stuff likeRelaxation & Meditation, for which you don’tneed to be a Buddhist nor would you need tobe involved in any religion to take part; rightup to very complex philosophical studies. Wedo a nine day silent retreat, and about sixteendays of very intensive retreat over Christmas.We also look at cultural aspects of TibetanBuddhism and have language courses; andthen of course we have the library, bookshopand a video library.

RB. We are also trying to offer somethingfor children so as to include every age group.

Do you work with schools?

RB. Yes, that been lovely.

AM. That’s been grand, we had somethinglike 250 school children visit the building in1998, and we are involved with things likestanding bodies for religious education. Wealso do a bit of teacher training.

RB. In some ways the uniqueness of thebuilding must be fun for school childre nbecause they get the two things. They come toan original building and see the cells andthings and then they have a presentation onBuddhism.

AM. Someone told me they took theirschool children to visit a project near hererecently and the children said, "This is reallyboring can’t we go back to the BuddhistCentre instead?" So that’s the education sideof Jamyang.

We share the building with different peo-ple, and want to keep the building open to thelocal community. We said right from thebeginning when we were fighting the devel-opers who wanted to turn the building intoflats, that we wanted to keep this building asa community building with community use.For example last Sunday was the fourthanniversary of us buying the building. Wehad an open day and a Christmas Bazaar,with candle lit prayers for world peace, andRobin did a slide show about his recent trip toLadakh. Events like that have always been apopular success, and we always have wellover a hundred people come.

DB. In fact the interesting thing aboutSunday was that the majority of people werenewcomers. Probably they were local peopleas there weren’t many of our regular mem-bers.

AM. About 20 or 30 people who cameasked about opening hours and they were allnewcomers. We have always said it will opento local people and one of the nice ways thathappened, is that we opened a

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meeting/training room right at the begin-ning. Here we thought, rather than attractother Buddhist groups, or offering yoga andTai ch'I, activities people normally associatewith as ‘alternative’, we actually gave themmainstream. The building is used 2 or 3 daysa week by healthcare organisations, dru go rganisations, homelessness groups, theLondon Cycling Campaign and Water Aid; awhole range of groups that people wouldn’tnormally come to a Buddhist centre for. Thetrade seems to be that we can offer a personal,warm, friendly, non-institutional space andalso a very peaceful atmosphere and that'sextremely popular. For me one of the high-points this year, was when I was running atraining course for homelessness workers incentral London about six months ago. Ayoung black lad said, "Oh yes, I went to acourse a bit like this last year at someBuddhist centre in South London" and I wasabsolutely delighted that there had been thatcontact. The door is open. People realised thiswasn’t a closed or weird thing, that we don’thave drugs, we don’t have bear feet, so it’s allvery positive. We have a therapy room andovernight accommodation, and that's proba-bly mainly it. In the future there will be thedevelopment of the café and the garden aswell.

Can you say a little bit about the intentionsfor the café and the garden?

AM. At the moment we have a tea room andthe wish has always been to open that up as acafé for local people. It's something that’sreally lacking in this part of London. We feelthis would be a very nice mix, of who we areand what we do, and what we could offerpeople, that is - a tranquil environment that’snot commercial, a warm welcome, and a bit ofpeace and quiet.

This will help people in need, this kind ofthing. In a lot of ways it will be our outreach,and it will have a separate entrance from the

street with wheelchair access so that peopledon’t have to come through the rather scarydoor into the Buddhist Centre; but can bene-fit in the most general way from whatBuddhism has to offer by using the café. Wehave explored it in a bit more detail now andwe are also looking into whether we couldoffer a very low cost period during the after-noons, which would offer services to theelderly, isolated or vulnerable people. We arealso looking at whether we could employpeople who are mental health service users ofthe café and are also looking at food delivery.We have been asked if we could take up cater-ing contracts. We already work with asylumseekers and the possibilities are very interest-ing. So its being set up now as a separate com-pany that will rent this part of the building.

AM. The thing about the café is that activi-ties here are slightly divided into educationand health, which seems very appropriate fora Buddhist group. Suddenly we found, forexample, we are a leading healthy living ini-tiative, and we are bringing together about 20local health care providers, who seem veryhappy for a Buddhist organisation to bedoing so. It is seen as, very neutral, sensitiveand listening, and bringing together new ini-tiatives. We are involved in things likecycling, active transport and projects like that,so the health side of things is running ahead.These will link with the garden because theentrance to the café will be from this spacewhich at the moment is a horrible concretebard wire courtyard.

RB. When we had the smaller place inFinsbury Park, one of its advantages was thatit had a small but well-used garden especiallyin the summer. People could go outside andsit down and relax. On the way here I wasthinking how incredibly important a bit ofopen space is for people in London. A lot ofus live in flats or in areas that are predomi-nantly concrete. So in a sense, to offset thepractice we do inside the building, being in

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an enclosed room and meditating, its reallygood to have the contrast of being outside inthe open air with tactile things around you,which puts you back in the real world. I thinkthe garden in particular can be a focus ofenergy for people in the city. We’ve got peo-ple in the community who are gardeners,artists and sculptors; so with the guidance ofour teacher and some reasonably good plansit can be, a delightful spot even though it’s asmall area.

AM. It will be of interest to local organisa-tions. There are two garden projects with peo-ple with learning difficulties in close distancefrom here. We are also working with LambethCollege who use the building as a trainingsite. I was even approached, last month, by anorganisation working with day centres forhomeless people who said they were lookingfor site to work on. Actually the local specialschool mentioned it as well so there's incredi-ble potential for a real sense of ownership forthe building of this place.

You have spoken a lot about all these variousinitiatives you have had and you must ofbeen in contact with lots of outside agenciesand you talk about being accepted by thembecause they feel that perhaps there is a neu-trality there can you explain that a little morewhat you mean by that.

AM. Its difficult for me to second guesswhat’s in other peoples heads but I can say inpursuing a fairly radical approach to commu-nity involvement, we have had nothing butencouragement. Nobody has ever turnedround to me and said why is a Buddhistorganisation coming to this meeting what areyou doing here what have you got to con-tribute. For example, for over a year we havebeen involved in the Elephant LinksPartnership (the centre is in the Elephant andCastle area of London).

DB. Were are actually just over the borough

borderline as far as that project goes, and Ithought we would need a passport to attend.

AM. People just seemed to be comfortablewith the fact that we have something valid tocontribute and I think its fair to say we getwarm responses from people all the time.This is complimented by their visits to thebuilding. Grant, you have taken lots of visi-tors around; maybe you want to say some-thing?

GO. Yes; people are always happy to haveseen the building even if there just comingout of curiosity. Particularly when they seesome of the major projects, and they’re here inthe large Buddhist room that’s been com-pleted, they immediately get filled with asense of well-being and a joy of the space.Obviously they want to come back, and oftenfeel surprised they haven’t been here before.We have groups in the evening, and last nightwe had a large group. One of the ladies com-mented about how we all talk so nicely toeach other, which made her wonder whathappens here. Normally, she said, in meetingsin other places you are trying to deal withother people, and she felt that here there is agreat sense of release; people relax.

DB. From my point of view the most impor-tant thing about Jamyang is this harmonybetween members of the staff. There doesn’tseem to be any abrasion at all. I’ve nevernoticed any.

AM. Well, the building work is in progress,but I suspect we’re all work in progress. We’revery open about that and to me that’s one ofthe strengths and joys of working here. I’llcome back from a meeting and say, "Youknow, I always want to be a model Buddhistat these meetings, especially for those thathave never met a Buddhist before, but I reallyblew it this morning. Does anybody mind if Igo and sit for half an hour and relax?" Thatfits in; its part of the atmosphere here.

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GO. I think there’s an acceptance, and it’sthrough acceptance I think, that everyone’sworking towards something on a daily basis.Everyone accepts we’re all human and we’reall moving towards similar values or aims inlife.

AM. It’s quite funny; I remember Clairecoming here recently. She’d been doing tem-porary work for the government and she said"Ah! What a relief to be here; it’s so peaceful"and she looked forward to coming here as akind of sanctuary; a place that would actuallysupport her in her values and where shewanted to be. That’s a kind of dream for mebecause its how can you help people find vil-lages of like minded people in the city. Youcan help people to swim against the currentswithin. It’s rare. One of my dreams is thatpeople won’t necessarily come here to go to aparticular event, but will come simplybecause it’s here. It’s a space offering some-thing they need, in a city where so many peo-ple are living in cramped spaces or livingwith people who don’t actually share thesame aspirations and energies.

RB. Or they’re simply lonely too; it’s a hugeproblem in a big city isn’t it?

AM. Yes that’s true, and many of the peoplewho for example, will come and help duringthe work camp haven’t got anything to dowith Buddhism at all. People will take aweeks holiday to come and help on the build-ing.

RB. We’ve had people who have had a fullwork day and have come here and workeduntil 11 at night.

AM. …and then thanked us!

RB. Yes.

AM. I believe in the building very strongly

from that point of view. I know it can go to farthe other way, and you get ‘stuck’ on a build-ing and spend all your time destroying your-self. Churches can spend all their time raisingmoney for the fabric, but in our particularcase the fabric has been nothing but anadvantage. For us just the experience itself ofdoing the meditation room….

GO. Yes, I think one thing that happenshere, is that you end up in this enormouschain of events which become a pattern, likepainting a room in an old Victorian court-house in a traditional Tibetan style. I think ofmyself sitting up there, having been born in avery small town in Wales, and ending upworking on this room in London, following atradition that’s thousands of years old, in aspace that was never intended for it. It isinteresting to think of these different placesand my passage through them being linkedtogether to enable me to reach the pointwhere I could put the brush on the wall. It’squite phenomenal.

You talked about like minded people buthave you ever picked up on someone whohas come through the door very reluctantlybut actually stayed here very willingly?

AM. We did, even last night one of the peoplecoming to a meeting admitted she was amember of the Salvation Army. She’s a realcharacter. I said I think about 80% of what weboth do is the same and she was obviouslyreally shocked by this. Then she started say-ing Buddha a real person, and what had hap-pened, and all sorts of things. Then she said"I’ve got to say something to you. I’m a bitnervous about saying this and hope you don’tmind. Everything is so quiet and peacefulhere and our meetings aren’t always quietand peaceful. Does it matter if we do someshouting at each other in the meeting room?"And I said, "Listen, we’re not perfect." So thatwas just an example. And that sort of thinghappens here. At first sight of the Buddha,

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she was actually in panic, that kind of panicwhere people have been slightly indoctri-nated that Buddha is a slightly scary, weirdthing. She left with some very positive feel-ings.

I think nearly all the people who ask for themeeting room, are repeat bookings. We usu-ally get a really positive response. If peoplehad a negative response I think we wouldhear about it. We do sometimes get commentsabout the fact that the centre is all vegetarian.Definitely people have a problem with that,and also we are going to have to sort some-thing out for the smokers. Grant have youever had negative responses?

GO. No I haven’t. I think because every-body puts a strong emphasis on the teach-ings, particularly if they are interpreted bythe Dalai Lama’s commentaries, people canaccept difference, and you can have dialogue.I think a lot of people here are familiar withthat idea. To a lot of people you say "Yes, weaccept what your faith is and yes, dialogue isgreat; and isn’t it great we can meet on thiscommon ground." I think people soften tothat idea but are not always familiar withthat thought. We need to accept that peopleare very different and to enjoy that.

AM. If I had a criticism of this place it's thatit isn’t as peaceful as people expect. Theythink they are going to come into somewherewhere there is always some one to listen, avery slow, quiet place, and I rush aroundmost of the time at a rate of knots wearing asuit. But it’s still a different way of gettingthings done; it’s always about ‘being’, comingback to the being-ness of the centre. We havea trust that if we get that right, the action willflow out of that. We don’t actually have topush; simply being here and practising hereseems to be one of the greatest contributionswe have got to make.

The Elephant and Castle area was always

known as a bit of a no-go area it could be a bithard yet there is this Buddhist centre right inthe heart of it, that creates a certain image.You seemed to have been accepted that thereis no animosity or even cynical curiosity thatyou often get in derived areas.

AM. I think that works in our favour. It’smuch easier being here than say in the middleof the green belt to be honest, because I thinkpeople are already quite imaginative and rad-ical. We are already accepted as a minorityethic group. That’s one of the few things thatcan help us if we are looking for funding sup-port from the council and so on. I’m notspeaking for all the members who live in thecommunity but certainly from the organisa-tions that we work with, I think it helps thatwe’re right in the centre of it.

DB. That traditional view of South Londonisn’t the reality of the people who live here.You just go down the road into Batterseayou'll find a Kurdish cultural centre, Africanc h u rches and much more. I think peopleround here, in the main, have a multiculturaloutlook.

Are you part of the post-war inner city diver-sity? The vast majority of sacred sites, in thiscountry are Christian Churches yet it is innercities that you find diversity SikhG u rudwaras, Hindu temples, IslamicMosques and much more that you often don’tsee in rural areas.

AM. Our main charitable objective is to makethe teaching of Tibetan Buddhism available topeople in the UK, and we started withLondon. I think we are doing that and I thinkwe are actually offering a very pure tradition.The Tibetan Lama that lives here has got anequivalent of a doctorate philosophy degreethat took him eighteen years, and he speaksextremely good English. So the very tradi-tional Tibetan Buddhism on offer is accessibleand I’m terribly concerned that we maintain

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that. That’s our strength really - hard at thecentre with this classic tradition. We are notrushing to turn it into English Buddhismbecause its too early, we have got to much tolearn before anything like that happens. Wewant to give people a pure undiluted tradi-tion and that's at the centre, at the core. That’swhere our strength comes from, and then weare soft round the edges.

It seems you are doing two things. You are areligious group with a specific religious text,which you wish to maintain and make moreavailable. But you are using that text in anoutreach way and through that you have anenormous audience. People that you don’tever expect to become Buddhist benefitbecause of your Buddhism.

RB. Certainly its our understanding that ourteacher has always stressed that we are nothere to push Buddhism in any sense we arehere to be an open family for those who wantto join in. All of us work from that principleand its very important that that's understoodwhen you come to the door.

Lama Yeshe, and the Dalai Lama, talk aboutone of the essences of Buddhism is really tobe of service for humanity. That’s really thewhole of the outreach thing.

AM. We kind of explore how we can out-reach to people based around here, eventhough I’m extremely concerned about thingsthat are happening on the other side of theworld. However, for me there’s an innategladness and good sense to be of service topeople immediately around us, particularlywhere we are situated in an area where thereare things we can offer. One of the extraordi-nary things about working here, for me, hasbeen the lack of strategy, the lack of targetsdrawn up in advance. It’s been very organic,very responsive; and it’s all happened fromthe heart if not from the stomach. The instincton how the place is going to develop, and as

you were saying, how people are going tohelp. Grant is an example, offering to comeand paint, and then this wonderful projectwas born (referring to Grant's project for themeditation room) . In the three months that hehas been here a huge artist-in-residence pro-ject arose. But I didn’t sit and think "Gosh, in1999 we want to decorate the meditationroom." Then it happened; somebody offeredus a thousand pounds as an offering to dosomething nice with the building. We had ajumble sale that raised extra money, but eventhen I didn’t worry about how it would getdone. It's an unfolding miracle to use a termfrom another religious tradition. There’s asense that if we get the basic things right, andparticularly if we get our own practice right,it will continue to happen.

Sometimes people say "Goodness, it’s get-ting amazingly bigger and bigger, and moreand more money is raised with fund raisingschemes." It’s so successful, then you fall backon another key Buddhist teaching: everythingchanges, everything’s impermanent, and forall I know something awful could happenand this building won’t exist when the newmillennium starts. That’s my practice as well;that’s ok as well. So from that point of viewthere’s an amazing lack of anxiety which hashelped me to direct it for the last five years.Everything is grist for the mill. I can see peo-ple using the place to transform their minds,which in the end, is the only purpose of theentire thing. On that basis we can do whatsome people would think are incredible risksand you know or experiments and everythingelse just flows.

On the question of grand strategies and tar-gets, if you want to look at the issue of sus-tainability, sustainable development, at themoment it is dominated by that sort ofagenda. But it’s about organic process andgrowth. Does that give you problems in prac-tice particularly in things like fund raising?

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AM. Well I think Buddhism is a very practicalrational thing as well, very pragmatic, so ifsomeone is offering us some money on thebasis of us having targets and even god helphaving a time frame we usually rise to it. Ihave no problems writing that stuff if I needto. To be quite honest it’s like the froth on acappuccino; for me it’s not the flavour of thecoffee.

RB. Having said that it’s good at this pointto voice our gratitude to Alison who has beenin the captain’s seat, so to speak. Some of usas Buddhists are very much sitting on cush-ions inward thinking and not really practi-cally gifted to communicate with the outsideworld. But fortunately with our manager, andsomeone like Alison, we have got people whocan work in these areas as well. Its beenlovely to see how more professionals havebeen drawn to us over the years; so little bylittle we have had the expertise to help soci-ety.

Its hasn’t always been like that; there havebeen parts of our history where we've justmuddled along in a very amateurish way.

You almost seemed to be expressing aBuddhist definition of sustainability.

AM. I think there is flexibility but the keything is that the building is here to help youdevelop. My personal policy on employmentis "How do we make it possible? How do wedo the things they want to do here?" Forexample, the manager; it was necessary topay a salary that enabled the manager to liveout, not well paid, but not on the poverty lineand that’s always been the policy. Picking upRobin’s point about amateurism I think it’svery important he raised that because there'sa very exciting juxtaposition of having thisvery relaxed approach to everything, but alsobeing as professional as we can. For example,we have just got our first domain name, so Iam now ‘alison@jamyang.uk. We’re network-

ing with computers. We have very sophisti-cated design programmes for all these kind ofthings. We have just done our first equalopportunities re c ruitment; we re c ruited anew manager, which is a key post, usingthings like the South London Press (a localnewspaper) and it was very exciting. It drewBuddhists out of the woodwork we didn’teven know about and non-Buddhists as well.We made two exciting appointments as aresult of that. So it's certainly not about beingwishy-washy in the way the place is run. Wehave raised £400,000 for the roof next yearand none of our funders would have given usresources if they thought we were wishy-washy.

RB. We encourage volunteers and newcom-ers to find a level at which they feel they canwork for us. They get an awful lot of comfortand contentment from other people in theteam, and from seeing that other peoplearound on a professional level can in fact ele-vate their own skills. For example, Grant hadpeople working for him that weren’t trainedartists but who have contributed tre m e n-dously.

AM. We have an active programme of help-ing people to go on training courses, helpingpeople to develop themselves in more waysthan one.

DB. Buddha says test his teachings and theteachings are very interesting on this point.Say we need a computer expert basically thecollective karma of everyone is that this per-son will appear. There’s no point in me beingaround if the teachings don’t work.

Taking this point about the teacher and teach-ings, the teacher student relationship is abouteach making sure they are right for eachother. Is there a sense in which you as a com-munity are testing whether you are right forthe wider community or indeed that they areright for you?

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AM. People definitely link up with us nownot just because of the teacher or teachingsbut because of the style and atmosphere ofthe centre.

The garden is not yet in place and the build-ing, at least from the exterior looks prettymuch as it did when you first moved in andyour are in the middle of one of the mostdensely and deprived populated areas ofLondon, which is primary concrete in itsnature. What are your aspirations for pursu-ing environmental initiatives, and what doyou hope to create?

DB. I was at a meeting a little while ago andpeople were asked, what were their gripesabout the area, what should be changed, andwhat they thought it would be like in twentyyears time. Many wanted to see the Thamesas a river you could swim in and havebeaches alongside. It became quite apparentthere were many like-minded people in ten-ants associations and things like that andonce we make a beautiful garden it will act asan inspiration and many people will followthe example.

There is a Buddhist teaching that the lotusflower springs from the mud and the envi-ronment around here is like the mud. As weput our fingers into more social issues likehomelessness, refugees, drugs and I can seepeople getting strength from that and helpingto improve the rest of the environment.

RB. Its amazing how the energy is shootingup at a terrific rate. I think it would be wrongof us seeing that as the result of our energy incoming here but in the short time since wehave been here, there have been manychanges. The hospital at the back is undergo-ing changes and so there will be changes inthe environment there. The fire station to thesouth of us was fairly derelict and that’s in theprocess of being renovated. Fortunately it will

be kept in the same Victorian style and thatwill definitely impact on all the street andmake it environmentally very strong. Thepub to the north of us was fairly run downthat’s been renovated.

I distinctly remember Lama Zopa and ourteacher Geshe Tashi Tsering gazing out of ourfront door towards the huge police station infront of them and saying isn’t that shame thatit isn’t lower, so who knows even that mightchange in the future as well.

AM. There are some obvious things to sayabout the Buddha, respect for the environ-ment and wise selfishness in looking afterthat, in tiny ways as well as in big ways. Idon’t think we need a big stretch of coastlinehere and we don’t need a huge national parkhere. Every blade of grass becomes very pre-cious, every plant and tree is precious. Everybit of picking up litter, every bit recycling isimportant. We can use the garden as a way ofdemonstrating good practice. That’s soundslike a bit of jargon, but we can do it, and sharethat with school children and inspire our-selves. But I don’t really know what's goingto come out of that. It comes back to not reallyplanning things. I think the garden will growin its own way.

RB. It was lovely to share with people thejoy we had when His Holiness The DalaiLama came in May and planted the tree, andthe garden got its initial boost. Also to expressour delight in the Tibetan Peace Gard e n ,which is within walking distance from here,we can all share in the pleasure of it.

AM. Its odd the way things mature. Whenwe first got planning permission to makechanges to the building our architect drew itwith traditional Victorian railings. A f e wmonths ago I was having a look at the budget,and blow me, they had costed it at £50,000.That just got me thinking why on earth arewe putting another barrier to the outside

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world. So we got new designs drawn up andwe are now having box hedges, cycle parkand chairs, and tables between the hedgesthat will take us out of the building. We havegot a lovely idea of having a seat for the pub-lic on one side and a sculpture in front of thebuilding on the main axis. So that’s an exam-ple of how things move along and I think ifwe made that very green statement right onto the pavement and also that gesture of wel-coming, by offering people somewhere to sitwithout having to come into the centre. Wellthese are the sort of things we are doing.

DB. My overall impression is that as thisplace has grown, the teacher has now goneinto a much bigger phase of the course. Nowwere getting up to Leeds, and Preston, andvarious places outside of London to do theteachings. But also seeing him here with aKangal drill knocking out the toilets in thecells, and the dust and stuff…

RB. Well, it’s been an inspiration for us has-n’t it?

AM. Well he’s the role model really, withthis incredible sense of doing whatever needsto be done and he's gets straight on and doesthem. And that's the Tibetan role. He’s thesteady smiling welcoming presence aroundthe building; the stable person around thebuilding the whole time.

AM. A very simple way that it works isthrough motivation. Most organisations haveto spend an enormous amount of time on thewhole question of human motivation. Even,say in the homelessness world, people start ofwith the most marvellous motivation but itburns out, its not sustainable, their not givensupport and methods and help. And motiva-tion is one of the key things in Buddhism.And what also gets mixed up with motiva-tion is money, which there isn’t a lot ofaround here.

RB. I saw a lovely film last night, a talk the

Dalai Lama gave. He ended it on the aspect ofmotivation. He said we should have a goodkind heart and compassion, and let that beyour motivation in the morning and a fewquite minutes and then apply that to whatever you do in life teachers, lawyers whateveryou do.

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Interviewees: Tony Thapar (TT),Landscape Architect; S. Jegan Mohan(SJ), Temple Trustee and civil engi-neer.

The Shri Venkateswara (Balaji) Temple project isdeveloping a temple with grounds on an ex-indus -trial dumping site of approximately 12 acres. It issituated in the middle of an urban mix of lightindustry and residential development in the WestMidlands. The temple devotees are largely fromfamilies originally from Southern India where theoriginal temple is sited. It is planned that the tem -ple and grounds should be as accessible to thewider community as possible. To meet this objec -tive Tony, the landscape architect, has createdmany projects around the landscaping whichbring together a wide variety of community andenvironmental groups from the area. The projecthas received national publicity due in part to thenature of these schemes.

Can you describe the groups that are workingon the landscape projects?

SJ. The majority of the people who areinvolved in this project are from India or SriLanka, that is where the families come from.But the project is from all communities in thearea so we have people from all over Indiawho originate from North and South India,South Africa and the UK, all taking part in theproject.

TT. In the last year we have teamed up withvarious organisations: The British Trust forConservation Volunteers, British Waterways,and Sandwell Health Authority. They havebeen the main organisations as well as artistswho have helped us a lot and there is a localproject called Churches Link Project.

Schools are another group, the local specialschool and the secondary schools in the areaalong with primary schools, have all joined in"The trees of time and place" project we run.

The site is a former a landfill site abouttwelve and a half acres in size. Nothing wasavailable so the Trust managed to buy the sitef rom the Black Country DevelopmentCorporation in the early 90’s. What we aretrying to do is reclaim the whole site in threephases. The first phase is construction of themain temple buildings. After that we have themulti-cultural centre which is probably aboutnine acres, which combined with the land-scape is about creating re s o u rces for thewider community as well as for ourselves. Indeveloping those resources we are addressingthree main themes and they are arts, healthand environment.

How do the different groups, either devoteesor conservation volunteers and others, workand relate to each other?

TT. Some of the devotees like doing conser-vation work. The BTCV (British Trust forConservation Vo l u n t e e r s ) and the HealthAuthority are helping to develop the site intowhat is called a healthy living centre, for thelocals. What we want to do is develop the sitefor people to come and use the resources,such as the proposed green gym, and we seethat involvement as a way of helping todevelop the landscape. Some of our col-leagues who have recently joined us havestarted using the site as a resource for art anddesign students. We have a student, from

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Shri Ve n k a t e s w a r a(Balaji) Temple:Tividale, WestMidlands

Sandwell College, with us today who is start-ing to do a sculpture for the site. It is a two-way thing: they see us as a source of inspira-tion and we like to use them to develop thesite at the same time. This process also helpsto get the younger generation involved. Theysee something positive coming out of it interms of things like tree planting and it getsthem involved because the younger genera-tion doesn’t necessarily get enthusiasticabout the religious part of a temple but theyunderstand what tree planting means, what itmeans to help the environment.

The landscape work pushes the religiousside to the background. For example the localresidents are helping with the litter pickingalong the canal and they have come on thesite to see what is going on at the temple andon the land. It has helped cross those culturalgaps which exist in the community at themoment and it’s made the project a lot moreaccessible to people.

Can you explain how and why the projectcame about in the first place?

SJ. Basically, back in 1974 there was a smallgroup of three or four families who formedtogether to set up a religious group. Theywould meet in each other’s houses. Thatgradually grew and it grew into a group in1984 whose aim was to try and build a tem-ple. They then spent about 8 to 10 years look-ing for a piece of land where they would ableto build a temple. They looked all overBirmingham and eventually they found thispiece of land which was bought for a reason-able sum of money and planning permissionwas given. So the whole idea came from thissmall group of people who said that we musthave a place of worship for ourselves.

Initially we were going to build a relativelysmall temple but then, like everything else,people have better ideas.

So there was no specific association with thisparticular site prior to the purchase?

SJ. Yes that’s right. As you know it wasextremely difficult to find a site with permis-sion for this sort of activity and we werepleased to get this piece of land. From a reli-gious point of view it was a very good pieceof land because it has water next door to itand it has got a hill behind it so it has got allthe features that you would normally associ-ate with a piece of land as a temple. It is in away ideal but we still would have taken it if itdidn’t have the canal and hill as it was theonly land that came to us.

Can you explain the significance of the canaland the hill?

TT. The Balaji Temple in India is on top of ahill and it has seven hills around it, and thatis basically the association. I don’t fullyunderstand all the religious association, butfrom the water point of view, Hindus havewater and fire as an integral part of the reli-gion and we tend to use running water for alot of things.

Can you tell me what are the main objectivesof the project?

SJ. The main object is obviously a temple andalso to provide a service to the community.This will include a community centre for peo-ple to come along to and do some of thethings that are currently lacking in the area.We are doing a study to find out what'sneeded. Essentially it is a project that willprovide a service to the community in termsof activities, play areas for local schools tocome and do nature studies. It was conceivedas a joint thing but as a group we are rela-tively small so we see how it develops overthe years at the moment we are constrainedby finances.

Bearing in mind your limited resources, what

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sort of needs do you think you will be able toaddress by having the project here?

TT. Well, from research and from talking tolocal people the most important thing is thatthere is a lack of clean green space in the area.The residents are all fighting to keep this areathe way that it is (most of the 12 acres is openland and adjoins another green area) for theirown re c reation, and we support that.Following that, we are in an area that has suf-fered from industrial activity for many years.In terms of conservation and wildlife thereisn’t a lot of value here at the moment and asHindus it is important for us to respect theearth and to heal the earth whenever we par-take in activities. That is one of our objectives.The other fundamental thing about the pro-ject is for us to build relationships with othercommunities. Hopefully this is going to hap-pen through projects like the green gym activ-ities, the community centre, the schools com-ing in and taking part in activities on the siteand for us to exchange cultures and traditionswith each other. Overall we hope the wholecommunity will respect the earth and pick uptechniques which they can try at home andwhich will help to increase their environmen-tal awareness.

Can you explain what is meant by a greengym?

TT. The Green gym was started by BTCV inOxfordshire. GP's patients, instead of beingtold to go to a traditional type of gym forexercise, they may be elderly or with learningdifficulties etc., were sent to an open site totake part in practical conservation work andget fresh air. That way they contribute and atthe same time get their hearts working andbenefit physically as well as mentally fromcoming to the site.

You talked about your faith which gives youcertain responsibilities. How is that managedby the faithful and shared with the wider

community?

SJ. I think what we want people to do is toappreciate the culture and not to be dauntedby it and for them to learn about us and for usto learn about them. We see it as a two-waything. We will most probably get people tocome and talk about our culture and under-stand what the religion is all about, particu-larly the children. We will try and get peopleto come in and talk every Sunday and thatwill be open to everybody to come along.Basically the temple will be open to every-body, it will not be restricted. The only thingthat we will ask people is to abide by the sim-ple rule of taking their shoes off. But essen-tially this temple is open to the public andthere will be no restrictions. But the impor-tant thing is that young people can beswitched off by sitting in a church or templebut the Sacred Land Project is demonstratingwhat their culture and religion is about. It issomething practical and tangible for them totake part in. From there on they may be moreinterested in the more theoretical side and ifnot, that is fine, the thing is that they areinvolved actively in some way.

You mentioned that you are trying to increasethe wildlife in the area. What other benefitsare there for the wider community?

TT. For the wider community, when the sitehas been developed, it will be a place not justfor recreation but for meditation as well, itwon’t just be a matter of coming to the templebut you will be able to sit on one of the hillsand have a half hour to sit down quietly byyourself and escape from life and relax. Thatis what is lacking here, somewhere safe andbeautiful to do that.

What benefits do you think you have gainedby being involved in this?

SJ. Well, I am one of those people who hasalways been involved in some sort of charita-

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ble work so it was something that interestedme. I have never been in a situation where Ihave not done any charitable work in my life.Essentially I came to Birmingham and I hap-pened to get involved in the group and I con-tributed to the group in my own way. Now Iam not a particularly religious person by anymeans, but for me I enjoy doing work fornothing. Basically that is my objective. I getsatisfaction from doing that and that’s thebenefit I get. I taught English to theVietnamese boat people when they came in1978 that was the beginning of my activities.

TT. The biggest benefit for me is seeing theyouth group getting involved in the project.Seeing them getting enthusiastic about it,hopefully they will take the message on andthey will stay interested in environmentalissues. The Trustees of the temple generallytend to be of the older generation and there isdefinitely a gap of understanding betweenthe Trustees and the management of the tem-ple with regard to the younger group. We (thegroups involved in the landscape project) to a cer-tain extent fill in that gap but it’s not workingvery well at the moment. Nevertheless that isthe role we are playing in terms of beingintermediaries to get the message acro s s ,because it is not always easy to get the mes-sage over to the youth.

Do you have a full range of ages of peopleinvolved in the project?

SJ. Yes, the Chairman of the organisation isabout 63 or 64 and it goes from that age rangedown to my son for example who is 14.Another example is a youth camp we have inJuly. We have children down to the age of 8who spend 3 days in the youth camp. On thereligious side we are working to give themopportunities to get around and get the oldergeneration involved and hopefully we canachieve this.

This is a major project with the size of the site

and the funds needed to build the temple. Itmust involve to some degree the entire Hinducommunity of the country. What effect doyou think it has had upon them to beinvolved?

SJ. The main benefit is to provide them with aplace to worship. The location is importantbecause most of the Indian temples are inLondon and the northern population doesn’thave many places to go and so we will pro-vide a facility for them to come along. Alsothere is no recreation area in the other tem-ples, such as ours will have, in the whole ofthe UK. All the other temples are templeswithout much by way of grounds. In moderntimes you don’t get many opportunities tocontribute to the building of a temple becausenot many temples are built as a general rule.

You have pushed the environmental side ofthe project, with the landscaping. Do you feelpeople will come from around the countryand take back some of that message and lookat their own environments in a different way?

S.J It’s definitely a long-term objective forpeople to take messages from this site and onhow we run the activities here. Today peoplecame to plant trees and they see this as a focusfor the type of activity that they should bedoing. If they start building their own tem-ples in the future from wherever they comefrom they may take up the ideas we havedeveloped here. It’s a bit too early to expectthem to take anything back at present. Theyhaven’t got round to the ideas that Tony hason temple landscapes, like greenhouses anddoing all the sorts of various things that hehas done. It needs to mature for another 2/3years before the message gets across. At themoment all they see is barren land, grassgrowing and tree saplings which are hardlyvisible, so we can’t expect significant mes-sages to go back from people who come hereat the moment. But later we will get the mes-sage across, it will take time.

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I am Sue Cliff o rd a founder Director ofCommon Ground.

My own background is as a Geographer,followed by a Planning Degree, followed bywork in private consultancy up in Edinburgh,where I did mainly regional and rural plan-ning followed by landscape work as well, as Iworked with a Landscape Architect. Thenhaving had a break and travelled for a while Ibegan work in 1970 as a Lecturer in naturalre s o u rces planning at the Polytechnic ofCentral London, and then moved on toUniversity College London.

At the same time, around 1970 or 197l, Iwas casting around for help with ideas thatwere already beginning to formulate in mymind, about ecological connections withinplanning, and I became involved with anorganisation which was trying to set itself up:that was Friends of the Earth, and at somepoint I became a member of the Board ofDirectors. So alongside my university teach-ing, instead of doing straightforward researchI was always persuading the people whowere my employers as a full-time Lecturerthat action research related to this organisa-tion was equally important.

So throughout the 1970’s (it seems strangelooking back at that time), Friends of theEarth, Greenpeace and a lot of the other bigorganisations were involved in creating theenvironmental movement.

But towards the end of this time, by the

early 1980’s, I believe that many of theseorganisations to a large extent had lost theirown way and didn’t quite know why theywere doing things or what they should bepitching at. There were three of us who feltthis, and we met through Friends of the Earth:myself and Angela King who was their veryfirst wild life campaigner, and Roger Deaconwho started doing odd bits and pieces forthem in the latter part of the 1970’s.

What was bothering us was that Friends ofthe Earth, which had grown out of passion,had become entrapped by more and more sci-entised, mechanistic, legalistic demands. Forexample, we were sitting for a hundred daysin an enquiry about nuclear power inWindscale, employing QC’s etc., etc., butwhat had been originally hugely important -helping people locally understand and standup for things - was becoming more and moremarginal

As we saw it, we had to invent the move-ment again. I’m sure this has to happen inevery generation - it’s happening all over theplace now. We had to try and work out a wayin which people could stand up for what theyvalue in their own place, so having watchedFriends of the Earth become over-scientised,we also recognised that so many other peoplewere engaged in conservation of the ‘spe-cials’, the ‘spectacular’, the ‘endangered’. Wehad done it too, and we think it has to bedone, but what we saw as much more impor-tant was the whole matrix, the whole thingabout the everyday, the commonplace, theordinary, and the importance of anybody andeverybody becoming involved in the grandproject of an ecological, ethical movementforward.

So we took on ideas which were going to beabout the local - and by that we meant neigh-bourhood, parish, not the local authority. Wewanted to take on the ordinary, we wanted totake on an idea that people can do it for them-selves, that they know about it and all theyneed, in many cases, is some confidence in

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Sue Clifford,Director ofCommonGround

themselves and some feeling that they canmake their voice heard. If there were ways ofconverging, getting together to stand up forsomething, that would be very good.

As an organisation the first thing werealised was that we were going to have anuphill struggle. As soon as you step into all ofthese areas that we are talking about - theordinary value-laden things, subjective andemotional - then we lose the easy, familiarfoundation of being able to count it, cost it,put some kind of strait-jacket around it. Wewere swimming in a sea of intangibles of allkinds, and we said ‘How are we going tomake our voice heard, how is anybody goingto listen, because everything is gravitatingmore and more towards the economic? Howdo we hold back some of that, how do wehelp create parallel languages?’ I say ‘paral-lel’, because we need all of that measurementas well, we weren’t saying ‘that’s all wrong’,we were saying, ‘it’s not all right, becausethere is a whole lot of other stuff that has to goin here as well, which is getting left behind,evermore left behind.’

So here we were trying to think through anidea of bringing in more subjectivity andmore passionate argument and it was at thatpoint that we realised that we were going toneed all kinds of help in all kinds of ways andwe realised that poets, painters, writers andcomposers - people who deal from the insideoutwards - would and could be, not onlyallies, but also could explore with us and befellow-travellers in our new quest.

I think we would now describe it as beingmuch more about story-telling and meanings,although we didn’t perceive what we weredoing as that back then. What we realisedwas that to some degree everybody bringssomething to the table, and what we wantedto do was create the circumstances for peopleto value their own values, while at the sametime we were bringing a lot of baggage withus, we weren’t simply coming in and saying,‘What do you all want?’ We weren’t doingthat at all, we were coming in and saying ‘We

feel that these are some of the right ways for-ward, where do you sit in relation to this?’and while we were willing to be pushed andpulled to some extent we obviously had ourown centre which was very important. Thatalways goes on the table and is very clear, butwhat we recognised in all that, is that if wecan help people recognise that they wereexperts then we would be getting some-where, and of course as soon as you asksomeone what they value they start tellingyou the stories that are attached to the places,the customs, the food, whatever it might bethat they value. Then they are the experts andthey lean forward and start telling you, ratherthan leaning back and expecting you to dosomething for them, or in fear of what otherpeople might do to them.

I think one of the things we were alwayscertain about was that ‘the community’ wasmany-faceted and had all kinds of ways ofcommunicating within itself. It means thatevery shared story would also be several dif-ferent ways of telling the story. For some peo-ple that is one of the great complications ofdealing with small places, small details andreal localities: the same story may have lots ofdifferent strands of telling. But there may alsobe lots of different ways in which people aretriggered into telling the story. Some of themmight be just a few paving stones along thestreet, a time of year etc., etc., so it’s a won-derfully multi-faceted beast.

Where do you think sacred space comes intoit?

It has always been interesting to me that oneof the first active state-promoted ideas ofsacred space in this country was to do withNational Parks. All of the earlier ones weremountains and I think that’s very fascinatingto speculate where that came from and why.It’s very complicated and certainly on the faceof it nothing to do with sacredness, but thereis something of it there. In reaction to that wewere standing up and saying, ‘Putting a ring

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round these things isn’t good enough. Whatabout all the rest?’ Putting a ring around youridea of National Park by definition indicatesthat the rest is not worth so much effort, andwe think that this is wrong. I think from thebeginning what we all said to ourselves isthat it is important that people define thingsfor themselves. It could be sacred or purelyhistorical, or just to do with butterflies orwhatever it was that turned them on, but itwas really important that they themselvesdefined that. They may disagree or agree withprofessionals from the outside, whether it bea whole band of vicars, or scientists who areinterested in geology or whatever it might be.What we were trying to do was to get peopleto claim their place in such a way that theywould stand up for it in the face of whoevercame towards them saying, ‘We want todevelop this, we want to put a ring roundthat’, because of each of these can be a dan-gerous way forward.

But nevertheless you worked in areas withrings around them, the Parish map initiativewas a case in point.

We define Parish very differently. You see,what we were saying was ‘We need a wordthat describes a small place,’ and we lookedat ‘locality’, ‘neighbourhood’ - we looked atall these words which are actually current butthey are all very cold words, and the wordthat kept coming back to us was somethingthat had a longevity and a sense of somethingsignificant about it - the word ‘parish’. Butwe said ‘you must define this for yourself - itdoesn’t have to be the ecclesiastical parish, itdoesn’t have to be the civil parish. It is aboundary of your choosing, if you want tochoose a boundary at all.’

Within the Parish maps project a lot of peo-ple did choose a parish boundary. The ideabehind the Parish maps was to encouragepeople to chart what they value in a place, intheir own time, in their own way, and toregard it as a never-ending process which

nevertheless is a way of creating an agendafor action of many different kinds. Lots ofpeople did choose the parish boundarybecause it means something to them, but lotsof people didn’t. At the same time we werealso talking about the parish boundary asbeing a very significant place in natural his-tory terms and history terms, and the idea ofbringing people with lots different intereststogether to argue for something would makea stronger stand, and you would find, andyou do find, that people have a lot of things tolearn from each other once they start compar-ing and trusting, Parish hedge banks or what-ever it might be. But by using the word‘parish’, we were trying to help people toreassert it, to reclaim it as a way of describinga small patch. One of our major funders, TheCountryside Commission, told us in nouncertain terms ‘don’t use it’, and when wetalked about Parish maps they were distinctlyuneasy about it and they always hated it. Yetnow of course it’s used in lots of ways by allsorts of people in the way that we intended it.

Was the unease because Parish is often seenas a religious term?

Many people, especially funders, do havetrouble with using terminology in a new andcreative way. We discovered that when wefirst used the term ‘parish’. So maybe, I thinkso. We discovered that we first mentioned itin Holding Your Ground, so it does take usback to the very beginning, back to when wewere writing that in 1983, and we were seek-ing even then, while we were writing thatbook, to encourage people to think about theincredible overlaying of richness that comesfrom nature and all of its work, and cultureand all of its works. There’s a real collision ofthose two things, and culture of course comesin lots of different guises, so in that book weonly got as far saying, ‘It’s not just naturalhistory but it’s about building and it’s alsoabout history in the land and it’s about how

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to treat the land,’ - all of these different con-vergences. Now we would add on, ‘It’s aboutthe celebration of locality and so on as well.’We were talking about the way in which peo-ple feel at home in the land in some placesand not in others, and things like that. So wewere already sort of striding towards thisthing which was a great melange as opposedto the compartmentalising. We still hadn’t gotit sorted out in our heads so the book is in lit-tle compartments, and anyway you have towrite in a linear way, so you are always in abit of mess as far as that is concerned. But thething that was constantly coming back to usall the time was this idea of detail and thisidea of accumulation and overlay and thingsthat you can see and things that you can’t seewhich have significance. And the words‘local distinctiveness’ just sort of came up andthey kept coming up and wouldn’t go away.Again, major funders hated these word swhen we went back to them and said wewanted to explore this side of things. Theytried in all sorts of ways and they still won’tuse the words themselves, the word ‘charac-t e r’ keeps being used and it’s not goodenough for what we are trying to say. But wehad already got on to the idea of ‘local’ asbeing really important, so it always is ‘localdistinctiveness’ and it’s very different to talk-ing about regions. We want people to think interms of a few streets, or a piece of land whichyou can walk around in an afternoon.

The thing that funders don’t like is any wayof using terms that is subjective, coming frompeople who live there. ‘Character’ is some-thing you can see from the outside, and theythink by not using it, we’re being slippery. Itis difficult because we all do look from theoutside into all kinds of places and we allhave our feelings about local distinctivenessbut we were saying all the time that it shouldbe defined from the inside out not from out-side in and once again the Parish map ideawas trying to make that come out.

How does this idea work in areas that have

not been rural or cherished, such as a 1930’srun-down housing estate in the middle ofManchester?

Well I don’t know if it does. I do know that insome instances similar to that, that it hasworked. Of course you haven’t seen thosethings because they have never got themoney together to reproduce them and veryoften they were transient things, they werethings that had a different kind of love, butthey have certainly been done in those places.They have very often been done on the waythrough to something else, as it were, but Ithink that is what is hugely important aboutthe idea of Parish mapping and distinctive-ness. You can start from where you are .Whoever you are and wherever you are thereare some things about you that are importantto you and if you are given enough time toreflect and to feel comfortable in circum-stances of exchange then all sorts of thingsstart to come forward.

I don’t know if you know of the group whocall themselves Power Information who worka lot in Eastern Europe and Africa. They haveused the Parish map a lot as an idea wherethey can sit around a table in a new place inLithuania or Rumania and say to people‘What do you value in this place and how dowe start putting this down?’ The great thingabout that is that you are not looking at eachother but at this piece of paper on which youcan write or put whatever you like and that isa novel way of liberating. You are not in thekind of formal circumstances where every-body is behaving and sitting upright - youhave already started to play in some kind ofway and liberate yourself into saying whatyou are feeling.

But reverting back to local distinctivenessso it doesn’t get lost: one of the other thingsthat people have constantly picked up is theidea of difference and so they are very happyto talk and what we encourage is if you wantto talk about regional diversity then that isfine, but then talk about local distinctiveness

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as a different layer or level of things. And ofcourse distinctiveness is to some degre eabout difference, but it is much more aboutthe extraordinary detail and extraordinarylayering and accumulation and pattern of thisplace and that’s what makes it different fromthe next, not just that its geology is differentand therefore the buildings look different, butthat at some point in this place’s history thesecustoms happened, and that jumbled its wayin, and that got taken out. It’s that recognitionof the gradual building of a place which thentakes you back to the idea that if you make aplace quickly, you tend not to enter the placefor quite a long while because it’s been bothforced upon the situation and it’s also beingimplanted with people and it’s too much todo all at once. One of the things that onerecognises in places that seem to carry whatcould be described as a numinous quality, orsomething which gives you all the feeling ofwanting to linger there (and that can be atown square or a small valley or whatever),very often the things that are going on thereare to do with a muddle of different ages leav-ing their mark, and that muddle gives any-body who knows the place a chance to telltheir stories from those little facets. It can be asmall building or whatever else that givesyou that feeling that this place embraces youand that you understand some little bits of itat least, and that therefore its cobwebs holdyou in place. We have always emphaticallymade the distinction to between the word‘space’ and the word ‘site’, which is veryoften used by people describing things fromthe outside: architects use the word ‘space’,archaeologists and you use the word ‘site’quite a lot too. We annoy our funders likemad to talk about the word ‘place’ because‘place’ carries with all the cultural baggagew h e reas ‘site’ especially where you haveworked in architecture and development andall that kind of thing, implies you have theright to do something there - either to thinkabout it and give it names and say ‘this iswhat happened here’ which is the archaeol-

ogy of it, or ‘this site is right for develop-ment’. But as soon as you call it a place youknow there is some realisation that there areother things happened here and maybe youshould tread more carefully.

How if at all does any of this fit into ideasabout sustainable development?

It bothers me, the coupling of the two words.I prefer to think about sustainability, and sus-tainability most pared down is about livingtogether. It’s about us all getting on with eachother at whatever layer or however one caresto describe it: those who are poor in whateverway or those that are rich and all those com-plications. So it means living together in thatkind of way with all our differences, whetherthat be religious tolerance or racial ethnocen-tricity or what else. And it also means livingtogether with nature. One realises that thesewords are coming into being over the last tenyears, they’ve been common currency at leastsince 1992.

The kinds of things we were trying to dowhen we set up the organisation were basedon an argument that we were making aroundthe idea that unless everybody joins in, every-body wants to live with nature and each otherin certain ways, we are not going to manage it- we are not going to do it. If a few people asprofessionals are running round looking afterspecial sites and that’s all conservation is, weare not going to make it. So I think we havebeen there all along. It’s just that now it hasanother name. Now, when you start talkingabout sustainable development as the big sopto those who believe that economics is thedominant force, I don’t believe it is. That iswhy I uncouple the words. Sustainable devel-opment ought to be about creating the cir-cumstances for the world to progress in a waywhich is benign for the people in the place,and all that nature has to offer insofar as weunderstand it. It is not about developmentbeing sustained. In the FT or whatever, youget this wonderful switch of the words so that

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it means ‘how can you keep developmentgoing?’ That’s not what I think sustainabledevelopment is at all.

You emphasise the personal and the subjec-tive, but we do live in a very hard worldwhere we rely on funding to get us through,and funders tend to demand specifics. Howwell do you manage those two worlds?

Well, we have a terrible time raising funds,and it’s partly because I find it very difficultto compromise in the language I use in appli-cations, which means that it’s like ships pass-ing in the night. They don’t understand whatyou are trying to say or else they feel uneasyabout it. They sense some kind of subversionthere but they can’t quite put their finger on itbecause it is soft - but it means the floorbegins to wobble a little for them. So I wouldsay that is a difficulty for us.

So what changes need to come about? Youhave a notion of sustainability but we don’tlive like that at the present time.

Well, I think what we have done is hold ourground and that is partly because we havebeen through the confrontationals and theparty politicals and all the rest of it, so weknow what that felt like and we know that itcan work and we know that there were peo-ple better at it than we were and we also sawthis yawning gap that something else wasn’tbeing done. Also one’s own personality traitscome into this. I am certainly not a very con-frontational sort of person and hate to have totake on that type of role.

So all these things come into play, but I alsothink we created a difficulty in front of us. Wedidn’t want to grow. That worries some, forthe current model of life – growth is all andwe have always believed it isn’t but thato rganic, spontaneous combustion. I can’tthink of the word I want to use but that’simportant too. Throwing things out so otherscan develop them.

All of the work we have been trying to do istowards helping people to take on what theyfeel they can do, starting from where they are,with the idea if we can get lots of little spon-taneous activities like that here and there,sooner or later they mesh; sooner or laterstrands begin to connect; sooner or later -they may be nowhere near one another butthey may be internetted in our world widewebby kind of world. Suddenly people cancommunicate and give each other couragefrom a distance, and we couldn’t have fore-seen that at all when we started.

The idea of the thing you call softness,which I take as being about all the things youcan’t count, or the intangibles, or the thingsthat are about feelings and values and thethings that are about humanity and imagina-tion, are things that we believe are the solidcore of where we need to get to. If peopleregard them as being soft it’s because theycan’t face up to them. Quite often with a jour-nalist, say, you have a feeling they are notinterested in you because you are not behav-ing in a ‘small p’ political way and not want-ing to tell them of some conflict happeningsomewhere. Rather you are wanting to tellthem about some good thing that’s happen-ing and some models for ways forward ,which they are not interested in. Some of thetime it’s because of who they are and some ofthe time it’s because they just don’t knowhow to deal with it; they don’t know how tohold onto something that is positive and yetneeds words that are different from thosethey commonly work with. It often seems tome that when people say ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Ican’t be dealing with soft issues,’ myresponse to them is, ‘It’s too hard for you,isn’t it? It’s too hard for you to get your headround the layering of the arguments and theexcitement that’s at the centre of this if onlyyou would care to grasp it.’ ‘Softness’ is notabout easy options but about softness ofapproach. It’s the difference between clump-ing around in your Doc Martins as opposedto gently walking through in bare feet.

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Is there any final comment you wish to make?

I think it’s important that Common Groundhas always worked at the edge of our owncapacities in lots of different ways. Certainlyone of those is philosophical: we jumped inwhere angels fear to tread and found some ofthem were in there with us, I think. What wehave always tried to do is see what experi-mentally seems to work both in ideas and inworking out ways of doing things. As youknow we are not great thinkers but what wehave tried to do is work out a language, andit’s quite important to us how we use lan-guage now to work through ways of sayingwhat we mean. We also have to work outways of doing things, so we are not just doingwhat we are thinking, but we’re also notdoing without thinking. So when we’reworking through projects we have alwaystried something out, tried to push an edgesomewhere to see where that would go, andthen support it, but push it always out fromourselves. We’re still doing that and testingourselves to see whether or not this notionhas any validity, and there are certainly lots ofthings we have dropped on the way thathaven’t got anywhere. It’s fascinating alwaysto see that some things that we tried to getfunded a long time ago are now appearingelsewhere, not because we had anything to dowith it but because the idea has come to itstime, in a way, and that’s really pleasing. Wehave always found it very difficult because, Isuppose, in some way we have been anavant-garde of our own making and that hasmade it difficult in terms of funding andother things. Sometimes you look round andsee lots of people doing all kinds of thingsthat wouldn’t have happened without usbusying ourselves when we did.

We have survived but it’s taken its toll,there are moments when you want to rage,there could be so much more you could bedoing if only you didn’t have to fit all thetime.

In a sense you are at the cutting edge andthat’s challenging. There are lots of thingsyou think you could do but if you weren’tchallenging they wouldn’t be done anywayand although you don’t do these things your-self you see things being funded that wouldnot have been if you were not there challeng-ing. You said earlier that you’re not greatthinkers, but clearly there has been a lot ofthinking in what you have done and the qual-ity of that, the genius of that, if you like, isnow becoming a much more common lan-guage and that’s to your credit. It’s that soft-ness again.

We have never looked out there for a grandplan and there’s a bit of a problem with meabout this ‘visioning’ thing. We have alwaystalked about having a vision but it’s nowbecome this thing that you have to have. Youhave to build a utopia out there that youstride towards! We have always been willingto have a fog out there through which we cansee some things, and sometimes some thingsbecome clearer and then recede again. I haveto say that it doesn’t always get clearer andclearer, but I suppose we have been lucky inthat Angela and myself, who have done muchof the work, are actually very diff e re n tthinkers and very different doers and thathelps enormously. It bounces back and forthand is a very positive force. Then havingother people working with us for variousamounts of time also enriches the mist andnew things come out of that, and we havealways worked with other bodies because wehave always wanted to remain small andbecause we want other people to take onideas. We are not depending on individualsor the bureaucracies of organisations, andthat helps you think.

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I'm Sue Cooper and I work for ShropshireHills Countryside Unit as the CommunityEnvironmental Officer. Let me describe myjob: I work with communities within TheS h ro p s h i re Hills promoting, advising andassisting on conservation and interpretationprojects of all kinds. This involves attendingmeetings, giving talks, organising commu-nity consultation, proving information andtraining sessions, keeping up to date with thelatest grants and initiatives in countrysideand keeping in touch with local groups andi n t e rested individuals. I also edit theShropshire Hills bi-annual newsletter, invit-ing contributions on any subject relevant tocountryside and community in TheShropshire Hills. I am also very involved withwriting a community Environmental Strategyfor The Shropshire Hills AONB at the presenttime.

My background is in teaching, and fromteaching I moved into voluntary conservationwork and was fortunate to become involvedin conservation related training. The trainingcovered conservation management and man-agement practices, community development,events organising, interpretation and public-

ity and promotion. This training togetherwith my science and teaching backgroundwas a good foundation to start working in thecommunity on environmental projects. Ibelieve that Teacher training can be a goodbackground for many different careers.

The job of Community Enviro n m e n t a lOfficer is a full- time post and I work both ina pro-active way by promoting communityprojects through a variety of methods, then ofcourse the role becomes re-active as groupsbegin to develop projects. In this role, forexample, the first thing is to talk to peopleabout their ideas and plans and to beginintroducing ideas of networking and carryingout projects in a sustainable way. Such as,involving all sectors of the community in pro-jects, use of people friendly methods of con-sultation, use of local materials and localcraftspeople and businesses in projects

In a typical week I will give one slide talk toa group, either on a specific project such asthe Church and Conservation Project, Caringfor God's Acre, or the work of the ShropshireHills Countryside Unit. This is an enjoyableand important part of the work. The numbersof people who I meet through going out tospeak to groups is quite high and a goodmethod of getting information out, raisingpeople’s awareness of issues and keepingmyself informed of local interests and devel-opments. In isolated rural areas, such asSouth Shropshire village halls are importantsocial centres and occasions or events are usu-ally well supported, so talks and workshopssessions are often popular.

I would say that on average I spend at leasta third of my week working on sacred spaces,mostly churchyard projects, although occa-sionally other features such as ancient HolyWells may inspire projects. I might add thatprojects are not necessarily practical natureconservation projects there is a huge diversityof different kinds of projects. A few examplesinclude a local Mother's Union group embroi-dering church kneelers on the theme of thelocal landscape and its wildlife. A b o o k ,

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Sue Cooper,Shropshire HillsCountrysideUnit’sCommunityEnvironmentalOffice

mosaic and wall hanging recording the life ina rural community during the last 100 yearsand their hopes for the next century. Newcarved oak gate posts at the entrance to a vil-lage hall, repair of a war memorial, ParishMaps, village design statements – the list andvariety is large.

One of the reasons that churchyards weretargeted as potential subjects for projects wasthat the rural parish churchyard is importantfrom both a social and an historic point ofview and, of course, for nature conservation.They are areas which are under a manage-ment regime already, carried out by a wello rganised, interested and well establishedgroup, usually the local Parochial ChurchCouncil or PCC. It is not a question, there-fore, of asking anyone or any group to dosomething new but just to change the waytheir Churchyard management is already car-ried out. This may only be a slight change,such as cutting the longer grass a couple ofweeks later than usual, for example.

Within rural communities people and timeis usually limited so churchyard managementprojects do not add to people’s workload.

Churchyards are also interesting places fora rchaeology and history. Monuments,memorials, lych gates, preaching crosses, warmemorials all tell a story of the people wholived and worked in the parish and may bearchitecturally interesting. We organised aC h u rc h y a rd Heritage Day, which pro v e dvery popular to local people and it coveredthe archaeology and history of churchyardsand how to conserve this interest and devel-opment of further community projects.

Interpreting churchyards for visitors hasalso featured as part of the Caring for God’sAcre project. There have been display panelscreated, leaflets produced and flower festi-vals celebrating the flowers and grasses in thec h u rc h y a rd. This interpretation work isimportant and helps the ministry of thechurch and the church funds.

Local schools are encouraged to make useof their local churchyards for environmental

study and we promote The LivingChurchyard’s teachers pack Hunt the Daisy. Irecently led a summer play scheme session ina local churchyard calling the event "Go Wildin your Churchyard – discover nature andhistory". A few of the parishioners were notin favour of such an event. I only wish thatthey could have joined the young people tosee how interested they were in all they dis-covered and the respect and care that wasshown throughout the afternoon. And mostof these youngsters had had very little previ-ous contact with the church. So there is workto be done here in changing attitudes.

I would personally also like to see church-yards recognised and valued by all membersof the communities that they serve as realSacred spaces. Other cultures link nature withthe sacred and our local churchyards arewonderful places for nature as well as beingthe resting place of thousands of past parishinhabitants.

Sustainable development is about consider-ing everything we do, how we do it and whateffect it will have on others. It includes socialand economic issues as well as the environ-ment. At Shropshire Hills Countryside Unitwe support the Shell sustainability checklistp roduced for the Shell Better BritainCampaign and use it with local groups whenstaring and carrying out projects. In thinkingwhat a sustainable community would looklike some of the things considered would forinstance be enabling everyone to join in deci-sion making, with the opportunity to becomeinvolved and have volunteer work recog-nised as having a value, recognising andvaluing local distinctiveness and thoughtfuluse of resources. It is all common sense butevery so often one does need to be remindedof these things in a sensitive and informedway.

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I am Rebecca Cotton and I am a landscapearchitect who has worked in the public andthe private sector for the last ten years. I’veworked on a very diverse range of projectsbut all have involved the community in someform or another, from urban parks down onBarrie island for the Vale of Glamorg a nBorough Council in the 1980's to communityforests in Mansfield in the 1990's and morerecently garden projects that involve healingand sacred design.

I first thought about the idea of sacredspace working on a community forest forMansfield which was a MillenniumCommission funded project. It was therestoration of a number of old mining areasincluding agricultural land and my involve-ment with the community started on day oneof that project when I was asked to design amaster plan. However, I wouldn’t say itbecame a sacred space to me until I hadbecome involved with the local community ata level which helped me begin to appreciatetheir feelings about the space. It’s very impor-tant to get to that point because as an out-sider, unless you have some particularly per-ceptive abilities, it is not always immediatelyapparent that a land has sacred value. I thinkit is largely through involvement with thecommunity that you understand this, so onthe forest project it took probably a year untilI recognised that the landscape work we weredoing really meant nothing unless peoplerespected and responded to something in theland itself. This particular space was not

sacred in the sense it had some great religioussignificance, but it was a landscape withmany layers of emotion. It was a landscapethat was made sacred, if you like, by the clo-sure of the pits. That's all happened in the lasttwenty years and so there was an awful lot ofemotional investment in that landscape.People had died due to several mining explo-sions and later the land had been returned tofarming. In fact a very interesting cycle ofevents happened there, for the land had beencleared for the mine and had then returned toagriculture. It had been forest initially, andwas going back to being forest again throughthe creation of a community forest. Withineach of those times I’m not sure whether youcould say the land was sacred but the present-day landscape is sacred to the local commu-nity because to them it tells the story of whathas happened to them.

In order to get to the bottom of all thatGroundwork initiated an arts project, and Iwould say that it came a little late in the pro-ceedings: it was after the master plan andafter the major public consultation had takenplace. But the arts project allowed these sto-ries to come out as narrative and be publishedin the form of a book. This then led to a num-ber of discrete projects which celebrate partic-ular feelings about the place. How far youdefine that as sacredness is something I needto talk about in more detail.

In the first instance neither I as the outsideadvisor, nor the community involved, recog-nised the special nature of the place. Thewhole process took three years and is nowongoing as part of a national arts project forGroundwork. I think it did lead the commu-nity to recognise and understand their land-scape, and perhaps an important part of thatwas the beginning of healing of scars withinthe community itself - because we are talkinghere about an economically depressed com-munity with a number of social problems.

But I don’t like the idea of giving a nameand a label to something, as though sayingit’s ‘sacred’ then means that people under-

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Rebecca Cotton,LandscapeArchitect

stand it or recognise it. I think the definitionof ‘sacred’ is very difficult. I personally havesome problems with the word ‘sacred’ andmake a lot of use of Mircea Eliade's book "TheSacred and the Profane".

What I find very interesting about land-scape is how a place or a space can be sacredone moment and profane another. I’ve writ-ten a paper about this in Landscape Design.The way children use space is like thisbecause one moment it can be, if you like, asacred space where something special hashappened where the space takes on extraor-dinary values, and the next minute it can be acommon or an ordinary part of a park orstreet. I do believe we have to think about theway we consider the word ‘sacred’ - it isn’tnecessarily something that’s always there, it’svery intangible and may be transient.

I am more aware of definitions of ‘sacred’and work about the sacred by my visit toChina thanks to a Winston Churchill TravelFellowship and by working with groups therewho are animists: they are worshippers ofnature and it made it very clear to me that theway we regard sacred is very different fromthe way groups in developing countriesregard the word sacred.I don’t think we should get too worried aboutthese definitions if we have this broad under-standing that they can be ephemeral, they canchange, and they are not universal. We are notlooking for absolutes here.

But I think public perception of the word‘sacred’ is important because to some peopleit means a church or a historical monumentwith religious significance and that isn’t at allhow you and I understand sacred. It’s a termthat people aren’t always comfortable with.It’s a bit like the word ‘healing’, I don’t usu-ally use that. I tend to use the word ‘thera-peutic’.

When I went to China for a year I did aresearch project about sacred plants in ‘sacredgardens’ I was looking at the gardens of

Taoist and Buddhist Monasteries in theSacred Mountains of China. It’s much easierto define those spaces as sacred because theybelong to an organisation, and what is inthose spaces has some kind of significancethat goes beyond the ordinary common andeveryday. A marigold in a Buddhist temple isdifferent from a marigold growing in some-body’s back garden in Mansfield. So the con-text in which you consider something sacredis quite important.

What is your interest in sacred spaces beyondyour professional work?

I suppose one of the things close to my heartis my own painting and drawing. I paint anddraw landscapes. Sometimes I have a strongfeeling about a landscape; perhaps somethingsacred is provoked in me. It might not be anatural landscape, it might be a coal mine. Idid a lot of drawings in Wales of the way inwhich the landscape had been changed by themining industry and they were full of veryharsh lines, harsh contours. So I think that mypainting helps me explore what ‘sacred’ actu-ally means. I’m looking at bringing out cer-tain values in the landscape through mypainting. I would also have to consider theissue of spirituality. I think that I have becomemore and more conscious of health issueswithin my professional work but also myown personal health. My own approach tolife tries to incorporate a holistic vision and Iunderstand that in order for me to be happyand healthy I need certain sacred elements.

Would you regard the area of spiritual valuesas a growing area of your work, or a growingarea of work amongst other landscape archi-tects and conservationists and other inter-ested groups?

Oh yes, there's a whole movement in society,in fashion, in design, in architecture, in every-thing, towards incorporating some kind ofspiritual element. Now you can be someone

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who belongs to the New Age camp and saysit’s part of this New Age, or you can be alandscape architect, who believe it’s just partof good holistic design and you can’t be agood holistic designer unless you embrace allthe elements of the place and the people.These include sacred values. I do think thereis an overall move towards acknowledgingspiritual values in the landscape profession. Ithink it’s happening at two levels: there’s anunderlying awareness now of values beyondthe purely physical and there’s a more super-ficial movement, where these things are beingincorporated because they are market driven.

One of the things that has made it clearer tome that there is a need to deal with this ele-ment is one of the recent projects I’ve beeninvolved with, the new privately owned non-denominational woodland burial site. Thereseems to be a need for non-denominationalburial sites because people are feeling that theChurch of England or the Christian and otherfaiths and the public services available aren'tnecessarily giving them a place where theywish to be buried, yet they’re looking forsome kind of spiritual meaning. They want tofind another place and what they’re lookingto is a return to nature.

I went to the International Conference ofHealth, Culture and the Arts in April this yearand the way in which the programme wasdevised, looked at health under various dif-ferent criteria and one of them was spirit.That was a huge part of the programme andit encourages me because there were peoplefrom several countries from all levels; politi-cians to community arts practitioners andthey were all embracing the spiritual part ofthe way we look at our environment and ourhealth.

Changing the subject completely, what doyou consider to be sustainable development?

Well I think there’s a need for a holistic visionand there is very little work on the spiritualaspect of this. I would like to think that every

project I do comes under the broad umbrellaof sustainable development because what I’mtrying to do is think about things beyond thepresent, and not just in the immediate futurebut in the long, long, term future - maybeeven beyond that. The spiritual component isvital. I don’t actually think the current defini-tion of sustainable development incorporatesthe spiritual dimension. If I look at a project inChina I was involved in, which was settingup the bones of a cultural protection projectfor the Naxi people of Li Jiang which is aUNESCO World Heritage Site - that wasabout sacred sustainable development.

But do you think it has to do with future gen-erations or more to do with the present?

It’s a balance of both, well that’s my interpre-tation of it. It’s doing something which isimportant for this generation but which doesnot compromise the future hopes of genera-tions beyond now. It’s an investment in thefuture and I think it’s also a holistic vision ofthe environment, and of the world we live in.

It is incredibly important that we don’t justkeep thinking of the future and disregard thepresent - maybe this is something that is hap-pening too much. I think sometimes peopleinvolved in the environmental movement arecaught up in this fear about the future, andmaybe sometimes that fear drives too muchconsideration for the future and an inabilityto act in the present. I’m sure I’ve been guiltyof that myself

The whole way in which society is workingat the moment is consumer lead and not car-ing enough about the future. I think peopleare confused, there are two sets of values. If Ilook at when sustainable developmentbecame officially important in my work, itwas actually when someone in the organisa-tion I worked with was specifically appointedto deal with sustainable development. As alandscape architect it was not my role so eventhough subconsciously and consciously Ithought about that issue in my design work it

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wasn’t actually me who addressed the issueof sustainable development within the com-munity.

You, as a landscape architect, can have enor-mous influence over the landscape. In thatprocess you have surely been involved in thep rocess of sustainability. That’s obviouslypart of your training: you want to makesomething that’s durable, you want to makesomething of value.

If you’re an ‘ecologically-driven’ and sociallyaware landscape architect, yes, but there arelandscape architects who don't take that onboard as one of the most important parts oftheir work. For example if you’re a landscapearchitect and you’re doing the landscapingaround a supermarket, an out-of-town super-market, you could ask yourself, ‘Am I affect-ing the future of this whole region’s economyby doing a landscape scheme for a car parkfor Tesco's?’ when you consider that particu-lar development could be helping to is killthe smaller shops in the city centre. I’ve beenvery fortunate in that I have worked foro rganisations where I believe sustainabledevelopment is built into their philosophy,and perhaps quietly it has just been part ofthe way we work. If I had been a landscapearchitect in certain private practices I doubtwhether this issue would have been at the topof our design agenda. When you ask me is itpart of my training, it’s a very good questionI qualified in1991, and we never had a singlelecture about sustainable development. Wewere however quite well trained in ecology.My training in sustainable developmentcomes from my degree in Geography where Itook a number of options on development inthe third world, where sustainable develop-ment issues are very important. That’s onestep, looking at the third world, but it’s a veryd i ff e rent thing looking at our communityhere in Britain. Perhaps I was better trained tounderstand the whole issue of sustainabledevelopment in the third world than I have

been in my own country. But I’ve applied theprinciples I’ve learned to the situation here.I’m influenced by sustainability and sustain-able development issues in probably everyaspect of my life. Well, we all are, aren’t we?

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I'm Ian Roberts, a director of Environ, whichis a charity established to promote sustain-able development practically. In terms of myb a c k g round, I am a civil engineer. I’veworked with BP as a postgraduate, I gotbored and went off to Manchester Businessschool and did an MBA. I then worked as amanagement consultant before going to headup a public company in New Zealand whichI did for three years in the 1980's, then in 1990I worked with Environ to try to apply some ofmy business skills to the environmental sec-tor. That's what I've been doing for the last tenyears. Environ's agenda has shifted fro mdoing practical environmental projects in theearly days to grappling with this notion ofsustainable development.

My work is now far more focused than itwas. Five or six years ago we got involved inanything to do with sustainable developmentand what we came to realise was that it was avery wide-ranging issue and the market’sbecome segmented, if you like, and one hadto identify a niche and realise you cannot doit all these days. What I do in Environ is Iwork particularly with large organisations inthe public sector, large local authorities, cer-

tain government departments and also busi-nesses in the private sector. Increasingly wework on issues about communication andtraining, facilitating discussion, trying to helporganisations understand what sustainabledevelopment means to them practically, so Iam not so involved in running practical pro-jects although other members of the companystill do that work.

I think what is particularly interesting atthe moment is the work with local authori-ties. At the moment we work with seven oreight local authorities and we typically workwith their senior teams, but what has becomeinteresting is that we have moved away fromtrying to help people articulate what a sus-tainable Leicester or Derby requires, or what-ever, and we have moved increasingly to helppeople figure out how to communicate withtheir communities to begin to create a collec-tive view of what the city's communitieswould require. So in a sense the most effectivework we do with these local authoritiesinvolves a huge amount of work with com-munity groups.

I think what we have begun to understand,and I must say it’s early days, this, and we’rewrestling with this, but I think our definitionof sustainable development is not at this stageabout figuring how much energy we shouldgenerate, it’s how we create generative envi-ronments, if you like, in which people canmake a contribution to their decisions, inwhich people privately or collectively canhave a realisation, make a breakthrough ifyou like. So for example we are working withlots of local authorities on community indica-tors projects which are designed to consultwith community groups and help thosegroups in particular with their projects, andhelp local authorities think about how theymight respond. It’s all very simple really, butit’s all the bits that tend to get overlooked.

Tell me about your work with sacred space.

I think what's interesting is that our work on

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Ian Roberts,EnvironmentalConsultant &AssociateDirector ofEnviron,Leicester

sacred spaces comes from such a range - workfor example in India on the Friends ofVrindavan Project. Just this week we havehad talks with a very senior civil servant fromthe Department of the Environment inVrindavan. What we attempt to do there israise money abroad and then send it to Indiaand the local Friends of Vrindavan trusteesthen spend that money on improving thequality of the environment for the peoplewho live in that very sacred town. We havereally encouraged people to help and supportthe project. Many, many Indians in Leicesterfor example have a very heartfelt connectionwith India - it’s very tangible. We talk aboutit, many of them work together and certainlythey are very comfortable with the idea ofmaking a contribution and donation for workthat enhances Vrindavan.

Again we see the changes there. Friends ofVrindavan had an early corporate ideal ofstruggling with protecting the sacred forests,but eventually the work we did there wasactually as much about cleaning the streetsand dealing with issues of sanitation as it wasabout planting trees. What I think we recog-nised was that while it’s important to planttrees in the town and the sacred groves, it’salso particularly important to make sure thathouses aren’t full of sewage because garbageis blocking up their primitive sewage sys-tems.

The second project we are busy with is awalking pilgrimage festival which will takeplace in August 2000 to mark the millenniumin Cumbria. It’s a project in its early stagesbut it’s designed to take people to sacredplaces across the county and encourage peo-ple to reflect on what’s gone on over a coupleof thousand years and to enjoy the naturalbeauty of the place, and perhaps in a reflec-tive mood to think about what’s coming up interms of the next millennium.

The third project is particularly interestingfor me. Last June we worked on a trainingprogramme with the private sector whichinvolved a number of companies (confiden-

tiality doesn’t allow me to name them), onevery large fruit company, the largest in theworld of its type, and a high street eco-com-pany which asked their staff to think aboutthe future of their companies, which is aboutleadership and sustainable development. Wedecided to hold the meeting in Salisbury andwe spent a great deal of time in SalisburyCathedral. The purpose of that was to encour-age people to think and reflect on the natureof the people who built the cathedral. Whydid they do that? What drove them? Whatwas in their hearts and minds? We also tookpeople to Stonehenge to watch the sunrise. Ina sense we used the sacred places as a venueto encourage people to be reflective and ithad the most extraordinary effect on people.They thought it was the most profound pro-gramme they had ever had and it had themost profound effect on them and most weremoved by the experience. Some time later Ispoke to Peter Miller who was the warden ofthe Iona Community and he was talkingabout how Iona has an effect on people, evenhardened business people, they were oftendeeply affected by the place. His view wasthat if we were doing this work with individ-uals in organisations and local authorities,effectively it is best do it in sacred placesbecause there is something about these placesthat encourages reflection. To give you anexample, we went into Salisbury Cathedraland it was all arranged so we had a guide andas we went round we came across a woodens c reen that had been carved, a beautifulscreen that depicted the lives of the saints andso on. We met a fellow who was carving it, hewas probably in his fifties and it had takenhim several years to get as far as he had got.He said that it was now his life’s work to fin-ish the screen, and that was all he could hopeto do because of the intricacy of the work, buthe also knew that it would be around for hun-dreds if not thousands of years. Again thathad such an impact on people, the notion offocusing in on activities that have a particularimportance and value to them, which is not

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so common these days. Those were the kindsof thing we came across in Salisbury and theyaffected the people we were working withalthough they weren’t a group of committedChristians by any means. Also this idea of cre-ating something, and the frame of mind youneed to be in if you want to create somethingthat’s going to endure. If you want to build abuilding that’s going to last a thousand years,what’s your motivation, how would you doit? Of course the idea was to get people toreflect on what they were building in theirown organisations.

Going back to the work in Vrindavan andhow tree planting led onto sanitation work.Was that an agenda the group realised itneeded to address or did the people inVrindavan lead it?

Its interesting actually, it’s this business aboutsupply and demand. We are all sitting inBritain in a very comfortable middle classexistence, raising money from people whohave never seen sewage running down thestreets, for example, and thinking how nice itwould be to re c reate forests and sacre dgroves around Vrindavan. We despatch thatmoney to a group of people in Vrindavanwho every year watch that place get ankledeep in sewage. It’s pretty clear those peo-ple’s agenda is not going to be the same asours, and what’s happened is that shift hasbeen driven by them. It underlines the impor-tance of having local structure to implementthose projects. Now I think the idea of pro-tecting and enhancing the sacred groves wasabsolutely right and nobody in Vrindavandisagreed with that but there were also otherpressing issues. One of the reasons why weclean the streets for example is that there arelots of plastic bags and these are the principalcause of blocked drains and the principalcause of poor sanitation and poor sanitationis probably the biggest cause of infant mortal-ity.

Is there an added sanitation pro b l e m

because Vrindavan is such a sacred placebecause of its association with Krishna and soit gets many pilgrims coming through?

I’m not sure about that but there definitelyadditional pressures It’s also suffering a lot ina way you see all over India. It’s interesting tosee how the environmental agenda is viewedin Vrindavan. Very few people don’t buy intothat agenda and that message, because of thehistory and traditions of the Yamuna andKrishna on the banks and the forests and soon. So there is a very strong resonance therewith the community in general but there isalso the immediacy of the sewage and rub-bish that people have to respond to and theshift in emphasis has come from there.

Is your interest in sacred places because ofyour professional work or is it more personalthan that?

I think that’s an impossible question becauseI don’t think we do anything by chance. Forme some of the happiest times in my life arewhen I’ve gone on what I call ‘clumsy pil-grimage’. I’ve been to the source of theGanges and Vrindavan and more recentlyparticularly I been visiting sacred sites inBritain - Lindisfarne, Holy Island of Arranand of course holy places in Cumbria. Theyare great places to go to, often beautiful withwonderful stories of great souls who livedthere and the whole occasion of pilgrimage isfor me a moving experience. So for me myp rofessional interests stand alongside mypersonal interests. Of course the more workwe do around these places the more person-ally we become attached to them. It’s a bit ofa cycle but definitely, for me, I knew I wouldget a lot of energy and inspiration from them.

Do you think that community initiatives onsacred places is a growing area of work in thiscountry, which is often regarded as a very sec-ular society?

To be honest, I don’t the answer to that. I

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move within a certain group, I work with cer-tain people and amongst those people theinterest in the sacred is definitely on theincrease. But I’m also conscious that that’smaybe just my perception so it’s difficult togauge. But I do know that for example withthe pilgrimage project we talked about inCumbria - we haven’t begun to promote it butthere’s a great deal of interest in it in localnewspapers and local radio. To u r i s tInformation and all the rest of it keep phon-ing up wanting to know more and the mem-bers of the public show an interest because Ithink people are intrigued. Now, whetherthat’s a reflection of growing interest gener-ally or not I don’t know. But I have been sur-prised and fascinated by the way peoplerelate to the idea of pilgrimage and makingsacred places more available to people.

What do you consider to be sustainabledevelopment?

There are definitely a range of views on whatsustainable development is. If you look at ourpromotional material you see that sustainabledevelopment is about meeting our needswithout jeopardising those of future genera-tions. It’s an integration of social, economicand environmental issues so we are well-versed in what traditional people typicallyregarded as sustainable development, henceall our applications have focused on that. ButI think in addition we are beginning to realisethat describing sustainable development assome kind of end state is in the end some sortof cultural value, and what is much moreinteresting is seeing sustainable developmentas a catalyst for change or a catalyst aroundwhich people can investigate new ways ofworking and better ways of making decisionswhich are more enlightening for communi-ties, for example to meet their aspirations. Sowe are increasingly moving to the processesthat allow companies, local authorities orlocal communities to express for themselveswhat they think sustainable development is,

and actually start the shift towards it. We aretending to be less prescriptive about what itmight be. The main underlying reason forthat is that the end state is changing all thetime and is therefore difficult to determinewith the companies we work with. Who thehell are we to determine what the sustainablefuture should be for them? It’s impossible tofully understand people’s context. So I thinkin part, yes, what we do would be recognisedas mainstream thinking and understandingsof sustainable development, but increasinglywe are having to dig behind it and find outhow can it be implemented and what are thep rocesses that practically can be applied.Those are typically to do with different waysof encouraging individuals to reflect onwhat’s important to them, what they are hop-ing to achieve within their jobs and their pri-vate lives, and then working with groups ofpeople to allow those agendas to be collec-tively articulated. Then, particularly in theorganisations with whom we work, we needto see how the new game if you like, the newview, can be expressed as practical projectsand what we then have to do is set these pro-jects up and watch, over time, how the organ-isation responds to that. We’re trying to learna few lessons on what’s going on and whatworks within organisations. So I think behindthe traditional definitions of sustainabledevelopment is a whole other thing that wedo which is about cultural change.

People do consider the issue of sustainabledevelopment in projects, but the question isto what extent the words are ever under-stood. We go all over the place into differentcommunities and do a project about a sus-tainable future for this neighbourhood, but sooften it’s just a phrase that’s bandied aroundand it doesn’t mean very much. So whilst itmakes an appearance I don’t think there’smuch mileage in it. You see that particularlyin the private sector where the word ‘sustain-able’ or ‘sustainability’ is applied to all andsundry - ‘sustainable profits’, ‘sustainablegrowth’ etc. So what we are trying to do is

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draw a distinction between the use of sus-tainability as a word being applied in an adhoc way to anything that’s desirable: content-ment and happiness, growth, and goodnessknows what else, and on the other hand usingthe idea of sustainability to create a definitionof it which is actually a process of change, aseries of techniques that can be applied, aconceptual framework that people can sortthrough which will allow organisations andindividuals to articulate where they want toget to and how they are going to get there. Inthe organisation in which we work we nolonger go in and ask the question ‘What issustainable development?’ Or ‘What is sus-tainable development for this organisation orfor this community?’ We ask, ‘How mighttheir aspirations be articulated practically?’And if that’s done properly and effectively,then what appears is as sustainable as it canbe. I’m struggling a bit with the words butessentially I don’t think we attempt to build apicture of sustainable development for anorganisation or community.

The whole sustainable developmentagenda will only make sense to people whenit moves away from the conceptual and intel-lectual into some sort of realisation of its pos-sibilities. We did some interesting workrecently with a couple of officers from anorganisation in a workshop for their organi-sation. In the discussion they articulated avery practical example on how they wouldlike to put this concept into practice whichwould be to create a sustainability checklistso when they assessed grant applicationsthey can begin to build some of the issuesthey believe are important into the process,which is something that a number of organi-sations now do. When that happens, peoplesee that it can be practical and they can takesmall steps to do something about it. I thinkin that sense one of the values of sustainabledevelopment that we have stumbled across isthat it is actually quite a hopeful agenda. Lotsof the organisations and communities wework in, if there is one thing they lack, it’s

hope. We work in a lot of desperate organisa-tions. A lot of clients might raise an eyebrow,but we work in a lot of organisations wherethe culture is perhaps not as hopeful as itmight be. I think what sustainable develop-ment is for us, is creating a generative envi-ronment from where people can reflect andarticulate what’s important to them. Itsextremely hopeful and positive where youget people reflecting not so much on the neg-ative aspects of their day-to-day grinding cul-ture within a massive organisation, as onwhat is possible for them. If that hope canthen be articulated as a practical project thatyou can go away and do, it’s very encourag-ing for people. I think that’s something wehave discovered pretty much by chance.

Do you think that The Sacred Land Projecthas something to offer in the discussion andpractice of sustainability?

I remember being mauled a bit by you guyson the subject when I was drawing up princi-ples and values of sustainable developmentand your response was that we were not inthe business of selling principles but gettingpeople to reflect on their own values andbeliefs, because there is energy there and ifpeople are going to adopt new approachesand new views they need to be grounded intheir own views and experiences. We havehad further discussions and what Sacre dLand and ARC offer is access to traditionsand cultures that go back thousands of years,and with that, a huge amount of collectivewisdom and contact with people who workin organisations that are sensitive to whatdoes and doesn’t work well. So the approachfrom Sacred Land has a lot to offer organisa-tions involved in promoting sustainabledevelopment. In terms of cross-fertilisationthere is a lot of potential, for example on thisissue of creating hope. We run programmes atthe moment which adopt a festive, celebra-tory approach and I think that is true ofSacred Land. So there are those elements, and

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I have talked about taking people out of theirnormal environments and taking them off tosacred sites. I think they create great opportu-nities. We work with business people, activ-ity-oriented people that are always very busy,and we take them to a place and say ‘Don’tjust do something - sit there and be reflective!’It creates a great opportunity. That’s where Ithink people like ourselves, who are in thebusiness of clarifying the agenda, clarifyingthe means of delivery, working in a labyrinth,can gain enormously from the Sacred LandProject and hopefully somewhere along theway this humble secular agenda of sustain-able development can somehow support theSacred Land Project.

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