Letter from the Edge - Lowestoft

Hugh Ellis paid us a visit in Lowestoft to catch up with some members of UseYourVoice about land and community and flood barriers and whatever came up over the excellent coffee in the Mayfly community cafe.

It's always a pleasure to be around Hugh's directness with regard to the jungle of information and obfuscation around climate change issues.

Some questions are not easily answered, but then some are: has the picture somehow changed now that Lowestoft is not going to get a flood barrier in the near future? No it hasn't. The threat to the town has only increased with new sea level rise predictions and the modelling that pointed to the need for combined sea defences - walls and barrier - remains unchallenged.

The Environment Agency now acknowledges that some places on the east coast simply cannot be saved, but there are still potential solutions for Lowestoft at least. It requires creative thinking and it also requires community-oriented plans and outcomes over profit-led projects. And it requires speaking out...

After the talk, off to view some potential sites that the community might become stewards of. What does real stewardship mean? Well that's clearly part of the journey we are on in this project, but some degree of entrustment and agency surely has to be a starting point.

Of the ones we saw, these two caught our imagination most:

A disused garage right in the middle of the least green district of the town. A community garden here would be a transformative change to the look and feel of this neighbourhood.

And this beautiful plot of land has survived right in the middle of some 1920s garden city-inspired housing. It would make , as Hugh pointed out, a perfect village green. Maybe that was the intention of those original architects. Could community stewardship bring that about a century on?

There are other spaces to look at and other community plans to connect with but both these spaces are very exciting prospects.