Bristol pound is just one example of what local currencies can achieve
I drove to Gainsborough on Sunday to meet up with my dad for father’s day. On the way I caught the food programme on Radio 4 and heard the inspirational story of Mott Green the originator of the Grenada Chocolate company.
This really resonated with an, until then, unconnected experience I had whilst evaluating a Leader project in Cumbria. This involves a woodworker who creates bespoke furniture from trees felled on the property of his customers – converting their resources into furniture and other goods “at cost”. I loved the neatness of this super-local supply chain. It made me think about how in addition to the idea of local retail and local currencies (and all the things that go with the transition movement) a rediscovery of the ability to localise all the inputs needed to make a place self-sufficient might be genuinely possible. I can hear your cries of “There goes Tom Good” now! I suspect this is neither possible, nor desirable however another Cumbrian phenomenon – the growth of the micro-brewery movement with over 30 such establishments in that county had got me thinking. It had got me thinking about growing local enthusiasm to move as far away as possible from the sort of global supply chain approaches which mix horse, pig and beef in the same burger.
Then came the radio story of Mott – you can read more about him here. In essence he recreated every aspect needed to produce chocolate “from tree to bar” at a level that fitted the local economy, through his own inventiveness and determination in Grenada. Doubly prescient in terms of my thought patterns in that I should have heard this story on the way to Gainsborough home of the packaging machine industry which spawned Cadbury’s “Roses”.
Where is all this leading? Well in addition to providing the international context (via Bristol) for local currencies through the article which follows, it made me muse on the manufacturing rather than the commerce side of local economic action. I have read lots of individual stories about community energy schemes, micro-brewing, local food more broadly and some other interesting angles around things like the centre for alternative technology in Wales, but I really do think there is scope to bring all these examples together. If that was done effectively I think it would open up a new strand in distilling and spreading good practice in mega-local responses to the global downturn. Responses in terms of manufacturing which return us to regional and local goods, with all their vernacular diversity and innovation and the creation of local employment through the re-birth of the idea of the cottage industry. I am not sufficiently deluded to think this would solve our economic ills but it would be another, however modest, brick in the wall. In the meantime as this article profiles the local currency movement goes from strength to strength.