A celebration logbook: Rich's journey towards Transition Town Totness 20-year anniversary

Richard Couldrey, Transition Together Lead and member of Transition Town Tooting and the Transition London Hub, shared about his journey towards Transition Town Totness 20-year anniversary. Have a sense of what he experienced and the amazing people he met through his words and pictures.

June 15, 2025

Part 1: The Journey begins

Well, I have a great week coming up…. A trip to Bristol for a precious in-person day with El Herndlhofer, Daniel Balla and Sam Rossiter AND a lovely leaving do for Michael Thomas. 

Followed by a trip to Totnes to hang with Amanda Jones, Guy Erlacher-Downing And Tilly from TT Liverpool and Rob Hopkins AND all the Transition Town Totnes crew at their 20th birthday! It's going to be awesome telling them all about the amazing work going on across the UK in my mini-talk!

What are you folks up to? What's exciting you this week #timetogetheristimewellspent

June 17, 2025

First leg done! Beautiful ride through London to Paddington and onto the train, time for some more prep work for tonight's Wales and England Working Group meeting up online. See you there?

Ah just leaving Bristol after a fanatastic few days. This arriving into the station photo is a bit of a tradition with Mike Thomas!

I’m not great at thinking to take pictures… So here’s a random selection - 4 of 5 spoons. From left ot right, coffee, tea, dessert, soup. Number 5 is even smaller! And is a salt spoon! Spoons were brought out on arrival at my best friend’s house, doing the important things first! Such a lovely set.

June 20, 2025

I have the pleasure of connecting with you all online in the Second Wales and England Working Group (WEWG) meeting - It was fantastic to begin to explore working groups (circles and sub-circles) to invite people to step into their agency and collaborate on this grand experiment. We now have an established Just Transition Circle and Youth Circle as well as emerging Mission and Operations Circle (a bit of a mash up, to begin), Communications Circle, Income Generation Circle and Events Circle. Scratch proposals will start to go up in the WEWG space for us to co-create the purpose for each circle before we test for consent in the next WEWG meeting.

For me, its a really big moment and exciting to think about a greater diversity of voice in the ideas creation - we still have a long way to go, but this feels like an important first step.

On Wednesday evening, I met with the Bridging Circle for dinner at the lovely Gardens of Easton. Daniel Balla brought his gorgoeus baby, Corin and we talked about lots of things aside from work!

And then a brilliant day together with the Bridgers, a precious in-person day in the home of the Bristol Climate Choir in Cotham. It was so important to connect and create conversation space for supporting you all over the next 3 months to the end of Transition Together’s current funding.

We spent time speaking into Geographical Networks, supporting the WEWG process and a draft agenda for our next meeting. The Geographical Networks conversation was awesome. Not only recognising networks within Wales and England that are already doing the vital connection work, but also thinking about recognising and supporting geographical identities such as Wales and Northern Ireland and inviting conversations about what support could look like for those countries now.

Also the London Hub – a recognised Hub on the International scene which has been active for years connecting London based groups to share, support and build a bigger picture of change making across the capital. Alongside is an emerging Hub in Cornwall, currently applying to register with the International scene as a full Hub. Two very different contexts and two strong connections with the 20+ Hubs on the International scene. At the WEWG meeting on Tuesday, Nick Drew raised a great question about the relationship between groups, geographical networks and nation-scale organising - a question which will be fantastic to explore in the coming weeks and months.

And there are other, current County-sized networks we have a lot to learn from, including CAGOxfordshire, supporting both Transition Groups and other grassroots community activists.

We definitely felt the limits of our current resources and think important work can be done acknowledging and helping to develop more relational geographical networks. Of course, this builds on the work of the Network Weavers report which identified the value of regional networks in supporting groups and creating relationships of trust, much more challenging if we only operate at the nation-scale.

And finally yesterday, off to dinner to celebrate Michael Thomas as he prepares to leave Transition Network after 12 years! He really was integral in building the funding applications to support groups in the UK through Transition: Bounce Forward and Transition Together. We celebrated his sense of humour, integrity and his ability to hold the strategic alongside what is useful for groups.

What a gorgeous few days in a fantastic city! Now, I’m off to Totnes to join in the 20 year celebrations for the “O.G.” Transition Town Totnes. I’ll be speaking on Saturday about all your work alongside the learnings of Transition Together in order to give a national context to what will be a rich celebration of a thriving group.

More to follow…

June 21, 2025

Currently live! At Transition Town Totnes’ 20th anniversary marketplace of wonderful projects!

June 25, 2025

Well that was a fab trip to Totnes! Arriving from Bristol by train was just gorgeous, travelling from Exeter to Newton Abbot, the train skirts the coastline up the mouth of the River Eve and round through Dawlish. It’s trips like this that make train rides ok.

I’ve been to Totnes a few times now, so on arrival, it was straight down the River Dart for a lunch in the sun and switching from the Big City to this very special small town. I was also immediately reminded of the hills in Devon… As someone who most often rides in the flat parts of London, by gum those hills were steep! Perfect for e-bikes, I’d say.

Friday evening was all about the history of TTTotnes, but not in a linear, history documentary type of way. More a collective re-collection, principally from Rob, Naresh and Hilary who were asked to give us a sense of the early days, with props! I was struck by how interwoven Inner transition was from the beginning, the roll of mischief in early promotions (and winding up Newton Abbot) and the timing - Naresh reminded us that the internet was just getting started in 2005 - Facebook hadn't really got started yet (imagine that) and the idea of sharing and commenting on documents or idea online was completely new. The way Transition evolved was totally in tune with that.

All three of them talked about one key aspect that we know and love today (and need reminding of…) that this is a grassroots movement whose intellectual property is owned by the commons. Take the idea and run with it, so long as you tell your stories back to the movement for the greater currents of development, you’re good to go.

In a sense, these three were there at the beginning, they are the founders, but so is the voice of everyone who experimented with the idea early on and continue to do so now. We are doing that in active dialogue with the founders, evolving the Transition approach as we go.

Part 2 of the Totnes adventure coming soon…

July 4, 2025

Part 2: Saturday

Over breakfast on Saturday I thought back to the story of TTTotnes and felt pretty grounded in the contribution I can make to this scene. Naresh, Hilary and Rob spoke with inspiration of course, but also with humility and invention, play and imagination about those early days and I was minded to think of those qualities and how they enable us all to find where we become “agents for change” as Kevin Anderson put it.

After a hearty breakfast and rummage at Drift Records (finally got myself a copy of Love’s album “Forever Changes”, such an inspiration to so many Scouse bands like Shack, The Coral and The La’s) I stepped into the generous Civic Centre and a hive of activity setting up countless stalls about the numerous projects TTTotnes are supporting right now (see pics below).

Down the end, there we were, the vagabonds from beyond the Town’s boundaries - Tilly from Transition Liverpool and Amanda Jones and friend (Shucks, I’ve forgotten his name, sorry Amanda!) from Transition Okehampton and me, repping Transition Together.

I was delighted to represent your work, everyone, and the work of the Transition Together team, particularly to stretch the view from this wonderful town to across the UK. I had a bunch of fliers and a map with a question - “There are 270 Transition Towns in the UK, can you name any?” All I can say is, we got there in the end… but it was a slow start! Community Activists are so busy building the future where they are (find where you feel you belong and dig in), it is difficult to make space for relational connections elsewhere, and Totnes was no stranger to this feeling, generally.

All the more reason to keep building strong networks to see the mutual benefits of connecting with others - the system we live in is set up as one of scarcity, designed to separate and individualise, to keep time for community breathing slight and oftentimes exclusive. It’s my belief that a key part of our work is to connect, share, learn, support and actively paint the most beautiful picture of community - an easy task once we see and hear each other. Creating space for that connection is vital. Finding the right balance between local being and doing with network building is something that motivates me and something I’d invite us all to embrace in our own ways to create a set of arteries for our activism to flow. In that flow, we can find our edges, our strengths, our blindspots, our discomfort, our moments in the spotlight and moments to lay down the beat for others, our chance to play in equity, my voice with yours. And if we work into that, down the line, we might just turn around to see what we have created - a polyrythmic movement for change.

It was wonderful to spend time with Amanda Jones , Tilly, El Herndlhofer, Guy Erlacher-Downing, Emma, Rob, Naresh, Jay and make new friends. The day filled me up, these places we gather is where the actions at.

And then – to cool down, it had been a hot day and I was looking forward to seeing Rob’s new show “Field Recordings from the future” in the evening, so I disappeared for a bit to cool down.

Here come the photos…

And now for the market stalls tour… Breathtaking what Guy Erlacher-Downing and the TTTotnes crew are up to:

July 4, 2025

Part 3: Field Recordings from the Future
Saturday evening, I was super excited to go see my friend Rob Hopkin’s show, Field Recordings from the Future. I couldn't wait, honestly, having heard the idea from early sketches to this wonderful flowering of not only a theatre show, but a new book ('How to fall in love with the future') and an album to boot! Rob is really one of the coolest people I know and both he and I are vinyl lovers. Truly bucket list stuff to make a record, a real spinning record.

My New Book

It’s out! The long-awaited follow-up to ‘From What Is to What If’. In the UK you can either order via our Crowdfunder, your local independent bookshop, or via Bookshop.org. In the…

Rob Hopkins

The show transports us to the future, 2030, to witness the future in which we won - after doing all that we could possibly do from now for the next 5 years, the show gives evidence from that future to inspire us now to keep going - its kinda like your older self speaking to, saying, “keep going, you’re on the right track, I know its difficult, but you’ll get there”… And the whole thing is played out with humour, beautiful video by Arlo and live video editor Tim, exceptional, textural, picture forming music by Mr Kit and Rob’s gentle playful hosting between the visual songs.

The ‘Field Recordings from the Future’ Crowdfunder is now open!

I’m delighted to announce the launch of the Crowdfunder for our Field Recordings from the Future project. The link to the Crowdfunder is here. Every penny raised will enable us to roll out ti…

Rob HopkinsName *

Each piece tells a particular story - from “The Beaver Ponds” - a rollout of beaver releases that trigger an explosion of biodiversity, natural and effective flood mitigation and deep nature connection of these awesome creatures to “Bicycle Rich Hour” full of whirr and click to “A Regenerative Farm” painting the picture of a food future where humans don’t get out the way of nature but deeply welcome our place as part of nature and of ecosystem engineers in natures recovery.

The show doesn't hold back. I cried at the site of “Warm Welcome” which showed us the cultural richness of a world without borders. Pure love. The feeling is dreamy, of a future so close you can touch it, but you know how big a step it is to get there, near but far, so much to release in our present from so much in our past to spring forward to this future. And this was only 8 tracks, 8 stories, a mere snippet of what is to unfold.

Shows like this, I believe, are vital for us to re-energise, to lighten our burden of truth and help us to dance with the challenges of our work, to move, to exercise our expression, they show us the future is already here and it just needs our bellows to burst it into an life. I have a feeling the show will be I high demand from Rob’s speaker circuit. May it play out from the conference halls of COP30 to the village halls near you.

And that was it, off home.

Richard