Cymraeg Rebecca Laughton, LWA Horticulture Campaigns Coordinator
On New Year’s Day 1994, a band of intrepid landworkers moved onto forty acres of land in Somerset to set up the fossil fuel free, low impact community known as Tinkers Bubble. To celebrate its 31st Anniversary, three residents – two present and one past – reflect on its impact on the wider agroecological movement. Those with an interest in community and land-based work are encouraged to consider it as a place of opportunity on the path of gathering experience of farming and growing, forestry and coppicing. Tinkers Bubble remains a place that offers an affordable way to explore rural livelihood possibilities by living communally in self-built, low-impact homes, whilst managing 40 acres of woodland, orchards, pasture and gardens.
The community at Tinkers Bubble approach land-based living with one foot in a time gone by and the other in a curious and slightly outside-of-time present. Work is done with horses and hand tools, a Victorian apple press and sawmill powered by a vintage steam engine. All show the potential for embracing both traditional and alternative technologies in an effort to move away from reliance on fossil fuels. Trees are felled by hand, logs extracted by horses and the sawmill produces timber that will be used to replace old roofs and build new structures on site, as well as being sold in the local area to bring money into the community. Another business is the making and selling of organic apple juice, cider and cider vinegar, using apples from orchards on the land. At present, the only livestock on site are laying hens, but house cows, pigs and goats have been kept by previous residents. In the past, community members have grown extra vegetables to sell at markets, but now the most of the produce grown is eaten by the community and the ever-revolving group of volunteers that come and go as they please throughout the year. Tinkers Bubble does not offer training. Instead it provides a place where those with some training can develop their skills, and a launch pad for those with no previous experience to try out different forms of land-based work. It is an intentional community, and involvement at Tinkers Bubble necessitates not only living closely with the land, but also with each other, in a way that is likely to be unfamiliar to many. Such communal living is both rewarding and challenging, but contrasts with the increasing isolation that seems to issue from modernity.
Photo by David Spero
For those living at Tinkers Bubble, the experience is profound. It provides both practical skills and an opportunity to test out ideas, while developing a deep connection with a very beautiful piece of land. Many of those who have lived at Tinkers Bubble have gone on to buy land and set up agroecological land projects. Probably the most well-known is Fivepenny Farm, established when two families, including LWA’s Jyoti Fernandes, bought 43 acres at auction in 2003, and set up two mixed smallholdings, comprising fruit trees, vegetable production, hens, sheep, beef and dairy cattle and most recently dairy goats. Experiences of processing apples into juice and milk into cheese at Tinkers Bubble led to Jyoti securing funding and planning permission to build a processing barn with Environmental Health Certification for a catering kitchen, juice pressing facilities, a dairy and a meat cutting room, for smallholders in the area to use as a collective resource.
Another ex-resident, Pete Wright, cut his teeth as an organic grower at Tinkers Bubble before undertaking the massive task of dismantling and re-erecting a half-acre greenhouse at the Plotgate Venture site also in Somerset. For five years, he has been growing large quantities of organic tomatoes, cucumbers, aubergines and other crops to supply shops and cafes in the Glastonbury area. Applying skills from his previous life as an electronics engineer, the glasshouse is entirely off-grid. Solar panels and a wind turbine provide all electrical power including that needed to charge the electric van used for deliveries and the glasshouse automatic vents, heated propagation area, pumps etc. The system is internet connected for monitoring and can be operated remotely from Pete’s phone. All irrigation water is collected from the greenhouse roof and it is intended to provide heat for the greenhouse using wood from an on-site willow coppice.
Whilst celebrating the achievements of past Tinkers Bubble residents, perhaps the most influential is Simon Fairlie. Based on struggles to secure planning permission for Tinkers Bubble, Simon adopted the term Low Impact Development, which is development which, by virtue of its low or benign environmental impact, may be allowed in locations where conventional development is not permitted. As we enter a period of planning reform, with a new Labour Government who seem determined to “Build, build, build….”, Simon’s book “Low Impact Development” (1996), details many principles that are as relevant today as when it was published. For many years, he campaigned for changes in the planning system and provided free planning advice to countless aspiring low impact developers and rural workers through Chapter 7 Rural Planning Group. His DIY Planning Briefings were published in The Rural Planning Handbook (2018), which still guides many land workers today. Furthermore, his Chapter 7 News evolved into The Land Magazine, a journal that has brought new perspectives, often wry and humorous, to all manner of environmental and land issues since 2006.
On top of his planning work, Simon also instigated the modern scythe revolution in the UK. Haymaking at Tinkers Bubble was vastly improved by a pair of scythes that he brought back from Austria in 2003 – they were much easier to use than traditional English scythes. He began to import Austrian scythes, and in 2005, the first Scythe Festival was held, which would later become the Green Scythe Fair. The two or three annual hay cuts remain significant points in the Tinkers Bubble calendar, with the whole community rising early to work together to cut the meadows by hand. Hay-making is an important reminder of what it can be like to work land collaboratively and without machines, with the sweat, companionship, and attentiveness that this brings.
Tinkers Bubble remains a place that offers opportunities for land workers who are interested in developing their skills and knowledge. Typically, people who come to volunteer for a short while get involved with a broad range of work, and the longer they stay, the more focused they can become on specific areas of interest. Arrival during a growing season can lead into an autumn of picking and pressing apples, which in turn flows into woodland management during the winter. Being alive to the seasons is a foundational element of living on the land, and keeps a pace of life that provides plenty to do for willing hands and minds. The community itself, the people that live here, try to care for each other. The nourishing pleasures of life at Tinkers’ Bubble include daily shared meals of organic food, interesting conversations over breakfast prepared around an open fire and evenings playing music in the roundhouse. There is a recognition that contributing to a communal system allows each person – resident or visitor – to find and use their strengths, and allows all of us to build a whole that we could not have achieved in the siloed existence on offer elsewhere.
Tinkers Bubble is open to applications and enquiries about the 2025 growing season; get in touch to find out more. www.tinkersbubble.org
Photo by Alex Toogood
