ACFM - ACFM Microdose: How Britain’s Coastal Communities are Reclaiming Power w/ Hazel Sheffield

Episode Date: August 16, 2026

Nadia visits reporter and author Hazel Sheffield in her Hastings beach hut to talk about the coastal communities that are reimagining their economies in the face of government neglect and climate breakdown. They talk about the Hastings Commons project, a constellation of community-owned buildings in a deprived part of the town, and the seaside village in Somerset that built itself a £7m art gallery. Hazel’s book, Frontierlands: Britain’s Survival in the Making, is available now. Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

This is acid man. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Nadia Idol and today we have a very special microdose interview with Hazel Sheffield. Hazel Sheffield is a business reporter and investigative journalist. Her work can be found in the national and international publications, including The Guardian, The Economist, follow the money and the financial times. Before going freelance, she covered derivatives for euro money and worked as the business editor of the Independent.

She left the Independent in the summer of 2016 to start a grant-funded project called far nearer.org, documenting self-organizing communities and economic alternatives in the UK. After a decade of reporting, that work has come together as Frontierlands, her first book. She lives with her family here in Hastings. Welcome Hazel to ACFM. It's so good to have you. It's so good to have you here in Hastings. Yes, I am very excited, listeners, that we are actually recording this podcast in a beach hut on the beach,

which means you'll hopefully get a few little atmospheric sounds. But this is an important setting for us because this microdose is following our full episode on the beach. If you've not listened to that yet, please go ahead and listen to that. We will be talking today with Hazel about her. her book, Frontierlands, and specifically about the coastal communities which she covers in the book. So it's a brilliant book. If you haven't checked it out, please go and buy a copy. I did a launch with Hazel in London back in March, which was a very enjoyable event at Hausman's in London. But here we're going to be focusing more on the coastal aspects of the book.

So maybe let's start Hazel by you telling us a little bit about how we arrived at writing this book. Thanks so much, Nadia. Well, as you've already said in your lovely introduction, I was the business editor of the Independent, and it was 2016 on the eve of the Brexit referendum. When I was covering the markets, was cycling across town the morning of the announcement to see what happened,

and obviously the vote came to leave, which was a shock to everyone in the newsroom, everybody in London, essentially, you know, the markets didn't predict it. the newspapers didn't predict it, the polls didn't predict it. It was only really at the very last minute we realized that the rest of the country had revolted. And I think I just had this light bulb moment and I was like, what is going on out there? And we're missing that story in the centre.

So I wanted to get out of the capital basically and start reporting from communities that were further away from the centre of power. And I won some money a grant and started travelling in search of what I called alternative economy. That was the sell for my funder, but I really had no idea what that meant at the time. And actually, what happened over the next 10 years is I met countless people in many different places over the country who were experimenting with different ways to revive and renew the failing social contract in places that had been completely overlooked. And after 10 years, 10 of those stories have now become this book, Frontierlands. And the full title is Frontierlands, Britain's survival in the making, which I think is a really provocative title. And it was one of the reasons where I thought, oh, I think this book is going to tell us something different or kind of say a new story. And I suppose one of the things that I'm interested in, and maybe we can start there, is this book or this work or this piece seems to be a frontrunner in developing a sort of canon.

about what processes, communities, people, institutions are actually managing to live, survive and thrive despite capitalism. So there seems to be a new, I think, discourse or story there. And does that resonate as a kind of meta-framing, I suppose, for this work for Frontierlands? Absolutely. And I've really noticed that this summer, the Overton window has kind of shifted. And I think, you know, when I listened to your ACFM about the beach, you were talking about this is the first heat wave. Hopefully it's going to be over. That was a couple of months ago that you recorded that.

And we're still in these successive heat waves now, mid-August. The heat has continued. Suddenly people are kind of waking up to this idea that it's not really about prevention anymore. It's about adaptation. And that shift in the discourse has opened up a window on a whole load of literature. of literature that I think is evolving in that space. So there's a whole reading list in the back of the book. But I was very influenced and read a lot around people who are theorising these post-capitalist futures.

Obviously, Mark Fisher, J.K. Gibson, Graham, Ruth Gilmore, Donna Harroway, Sylvia Federici, Eleanor Ostrom. But there's also an emerging body of literature of people who are literally reporting on how communities survive in disaster. So Rebecca Solnit has an incredible book about this called A Paradise Built in Hell. There's an amazing woman called Lucy Easthope, who is literally a disaster preparedness expert. She advises the government when there's a train crash or a flood on what to do next. And she's written an amazing book documenting what happens to communities in those moments.

And then there's a few different books that talk about how practically change crystallizes in communities. as one book by Gal Beckerman called The Choir Before, in which he argues that radical ideas are incubated in small, even obscure communities before they can change the world. And I know Nadia, when we spoke before, you were very affected by Anna Singh's book, Mushroom at the end of the world. Yes, I was reading it at the time, yeah,

when I was doing the interview with you, yeah, in March. Yeah, and she, I mean, she has, is a kind of lovely influence on my work. She is against this idea that capitalism ruins are dead zones, that they're kind of waiting for redemption or renewal. And she uses mushrooms and mycelial networks as an indication of how life can prevail in conditions of precarity, which is essentially what I'm doing with Frontierlands, right? This idea that the book is about derelict spaces and worlds that have ended in Britain, you know, the world of coal mining in Wales or clay mining in Cornwall. of metalworking, the factories of the Midlands. Each of the chapters takes on one of these derelict spaces and documents 10 years in the life of communities

who are occupying those spaces and reimagining them for the future, completely overlooked by capitalism and the state. Yeah. You've made me think about Budlia now. Have I spoken about Budlia yet? So Budlia, for listeners who are not as obsessed with plants as I am, is if you're on, you know, Manchester, Birmingham, definitely London, on, you know, on a mainline train and you're at an intersection, you will see this kind of plant with these kind of long buds with mini kind of orange flowers that's kind of coming out from like the corner of like the rail tracks.

And what you've made me think of with what you were just saying and how beautifully you articulated at Hazel is of how this, what was a, you know, posh plant, which was brought from Japan, like 150 years ago, effectively because of the Second World War and because of ruins, it kind of jumped the tracks. It jumped over and now is thriving in ruins. Whenever there is disturbed soil, this plant, like they can't get rid of it. Like it is a successful and I think a beautiful kind of example of how something unexpected can happen. And there are kind of communities of life which are possible. in exactly ways that perhaps we don't, we have not had the narrative, but we are just now, with the help of your book and other works, kind of developing that narrative. So you just made me

think of that. So I wanted to mention it because I love Budlia. But I think that's so apt, because I think, you know, some of the theorists and academics that I talked about, there is this kind of, on the left, this redemption idea that after crisis or the crisis of capitalism, that we're living within all the time that something more just or righteous will emerge and that will come from class consciousness and you can see that all the way back to like Marxist-Nelenist thought but also in social democratic thought we think something better is going to happen but the truth is that it's going to be a lot messier than that and it's going to be buddlier coming up through the cracks in the pavements and Anna Singh is also very concrete on this she's she's not talking about a shared consciousness

that will emerge she's talking about a patchwork of response to precarity and to difficulty. So messy interfaces, or Donna Harroway, this feminist academic historian in America, she calls it staying with the trouble. It's not clean and tidy, it's very hard to theorize. And that's the heart of Frontierlands. You know, often when I talk about it,

I get asked what are the models, what can be replicated? Yeah, I can imagine. And the truth is there are no models and the people that do this work on the front lines. They hate this idea. A lot of funders previously would say, you know, we'll fund you to try something out so that we can then replicate that in all the other struggling seaside towns, for example. And the truth is that at the kind of hyperlocal level, I like to call it the kind of last mile of devolution within your neighbourhoods. responses are extremely place-specific, site-specific, and they can't be replicated. And that is, in some ways, a terrifying idea because you can't have some kind of blanket response

to crisis. Governments can't, for example. But it's also extremely radical and freeing, because what it means is that we, the people who live in these places are the only people who are equipped to respond to the specific conditions of the places where we live. Yeah, and that says something very interesting about how we interact with institutions, of course. And I think what's interesting about what you just said is I think we're moving beyond the kind of global local in a sense. So it's not like, you know, that whole discourse and arguments. So I don't feel, and correct me if I'm wrong, that what you're saying is, you know, it's only about your community and we can't have a generalized theory or like solidarity is not possible. Now, I think what you're saying is all of these things are possible and you can create, you know, in a very, in a very, in a very concrete weight links and relationships and an example. And I guess your book is one of the, one of, you know, an example of bringing those stories together. But for me, having read your work and listening to what you're saying now, there's something

about an acceptance of this is where we are now. This is, this is what we have. How are we going to, how are we going to create beauty and joy and survival with the conditions rather than spend all the time trying to mitigate for and kind of push against. It's like this is here now, the climate change, the ruins, the being let down by the state. And maybe those things will change in the future under different conditions, but there are new possibilities now in a sense. That sounds like partly where we're going.

Absolutely. And to bring it back to the seaside town, places on the edge of the edges. of power, rural areas, seaside towns in Britain particularly, have been living in that crisis for a lot longer than places in the centre. It's much more visible here. You know, the homelessness crisis, the crumbling train and rail links, youth hopelessness is a huge problem in places like Hastings. And these things have been here for a long time. And so I think that in its own way has catalyzed kind of experiments in response to the crisis that we can learn from. So yes, we're down in Hastings now and it's during the daytime, which I've never come to

Hastings during the day come. That's not true. I've spent the night in Hastings. But my experience with Hastings was about 15, 20 years ago, my Samba band, we used to come down and play samba with the bonfire societies and, you know, parade along the sea and then burn effigies. And I have very, very kind of good memories of Hastings, but in that specific kind of fire festival kind of East Sussex, which obviously starts and ends, you know, with Bonfire Night in Lewis. I've not spent a long time here. Beyond what I see, I think it would be nice, Hazel, if you could tell us a little bit what characterizes Hastings. Like what are some of the specific conditions, but also maybe something about. the land and the topography and some of the kind of background realities which which kind of influence the political reality here yeah I can I can also just tell you how much I love

hastings do tell us tell us you know this speech like you said it's my happy place but I think it's hard to overstate like how important the people of the speech hat and this particular location are to me you know I arrived in 2020 I was living in a flat essentially on my own My husband was still teaching in London. And every day, every morning I would come to the beach because it was lockdown. There was nowhere else to go, right? And I met swimmers on the beach,

people who would go, we could go in the water together because we were out in the open air for our one hour a day. And then we'd have really strong coffee and go back to our desks and try to do some work. And that has evolved into the people that I now share this beach hut. You know, maybe it sounds kind of middle class and lovely to have a beach hut. It is, Nadia can attest it is essentially a cupboard.

under the promenade with a butler sink in the back. And it is part of the kind of, it's a relic of municipalism. You know, we used to have a beautiful Victorian, actually I think it was post, interwar bathing pool, just down the way in St. Leonard's. And further up, under the prom, there was a Victorian underground swimming pool complex. All of those have disappeared now.

The beach huts here, these little crumbling cupboards, survive right next to some public toilets that are completely no longer maintained. And when I told my friends that I share, you know, there are ten of us who split this, when I told them we were recording this podcast here, they said, perfect. This is the microcosm of Hastings. The street drinkers, they start about midday, right next to us, right next to the public toilets. The men's toilets are broken and overflowing.

The sewage smell starts to drift up as the day goes on. We have small boats coming over the channel here. There's sewage in the seawater regularly, so even as sea swimmers, we can't swim. It's a kind of microcosm of all the problems facing of Hastings. And it's a kind of place where all these crises, these multiple crises intersect. But there's also a freedom in that, right? There's this sense of reality being a little bit shifted. That's, I think, what Mark Fisher meant by when he was talking about acid communism, right?

This idea that you can try anything, since everything good and bad is possible here. My friends are artists. They own businesses. They've opened businesses. They're trying to open restaurants. I know people who've taken on the challenge of revitalising Hastings Castle. 1066 Hastings, that's what you think, right? And yet the castle is just a load of rocks that no one really had access to.

And they have taken on the challenge of revitalising that space and making it a heritage asset again. Just in the last year, I have a friend who's trying to set up a television museum because this is the birthplace of John Loki Baird. and I have friends who are doing weird audio festivals. There's always something strange and brilliant going on in Hastings. It is weird with a why. And I think it is that sense of possibility that is so wonderful here. Often the festivals, they are for everybody. You know, there is once a year Jack in the Green Festival,

kind of completely manufactured folk festival, to be honest, started by some guy in the 80s, where everybody dresses up as woodland creatures, parades through the old town and goes and burns an effigy of Jack on the hill, one of the hills here, and everybody takes one of the leaves. And, you know, it's just a big party. This is a town of people who love to party.

There is so much joy in it. And I think that can sometimes be lost in these narratives about seaside towns and all the deprivation that they faced, that there is also so much here to enjoy and be proud of and so much that glues us together. This is the juice that emerges, specifically. because these formal systems have withdrawn. And I think there's more than hope in this.

You know, there is activity, and that is what it takes to make change. There's possibility, there's space to fill, and there's a call to action to take part in a parade that is a small part of being part of heritage and folk and weirdness and change. And being part of this creates bonds. It creates juice that is so necessary when we're facing crisis.

As we're sitting here, you were saying this is your happy space. there's obviously a much bigger story than what we are experiencing in this moment and a hot day in August about, you know, the politics of a seaside town. And, you know, you've spoken about it just now, but this is really something that you focus in on the book because out of the 10 locations you journey through for our seaside town. So I believe it's watch it and Morcam and Plymouth and Hastings. So what drew you to that focus? Like how did this happen? It's more that they drew me to them. So I started with this extremely wide net. As I said, I had no idea what I was looking for, alternative economies. And the book has ended up being about these communities emerging in the ruins of capitalism. And as I've already said, the seaside is a place where many of capitalism's failings emerge, right? So I ended up visiting lots of seaside communities in my reporting, you know, St. Ives, Hartlepool, up to Port.

Patrick on the west coast of Scotland. And the ones that have made it into the book, for me, illustrate a certain aspect of our current state of decay, but also a response to that. So yeah, as you said, watch it in West Somerset. I first heard about this. Someone told me not long after I started this reporting project that these women had formed a community organization, community company. They called themselves the Onion Collective and they were building a seven million

and pound art gallery in the most isolated town in England. And I just thought that sounded absolutely bonkers and knew I had to go there. And it was really hard to get there because, you know, most isolated town in England, the rail links have disappeared long ago. There's a beautiful steam train that puffs in and out over the summer, but you can't get there by train. You have to go to Taunton. The bus doesn't stop very often once an hour. And even when you get the bus, you have to go down these winding country lanes.

I always ended up feeling, you know, car sick by the time I got there. and when the bus gets to watch it, it goes around the bus shelter and it goes straight back out of town. So, yeah, this is a place that historically has been known as one of the most difficult places to have a business, kind of lowest productivity for smaller media enterprises in the whole of the UK. It's had the lowest social mobility of any town in the whole of England for a couple of years in a row, purely because kids couldn't get out to college and jobs. But it also has, because of this complete isolation, incredibly strong social networks, you know, over 100 voluntary groups,

people who are just willing to get on and do things. And, you know, prime example, these women who'd come back to watch it to raise families after working in London and Bristol and had decided to build this art gallery, not as a place to display art as a commodity, like the noun of art, but as a kind of practice. verb of using art to reimagine the world. You know, they host women artists, queer artists, local artists.

Everything they do is about challenging the status quo. And presumably it was about the process as well. Like it was it was about saying we are going to do this thing that a lot of people are going to say how and there's something in that visioning that it is yeah that does a specific job, I think, at this point. in like this historical moment and also bring some sort of attention that is provocative

in the best of ways I suppose. That's it. I think it's also you know these women love watch it and they want to stay and watch it and they think watch it deserves a seven million pound art gallery and that is a beautiful thing and like just to that kind of

potted history of their story overlooks a decade of deep work with people in Watch It about what they want, you know, people wanted swimming pools, people wanted all sorts of other things. And really, right from the beginning, they put a shipping container on this derelict key side, covered in mud, and they invited people, families to come in and start to imagine what else could exist on that kind of empty space by the harbour. It was a very, very intense process.

And they suffered plenty of backlash. You know, it's very difficult to do community work in the current conditions. And really what exists now is a testament to their vision, their like passion. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, and I think, is this the first story in the book for watch at one? It is. It was. We start in Hastings.

So maybe let's talk a little bit about Hastings because I'm cognizant of the fact that there is a story about Hastings, which reads to me as a metropolitan story of Hastings. So I'm going to check in with you because throughout my whole career, I've been really big on traveling around the UK and making sure, you know, checking in with the London perspective. Interestingly, for Brexit, three weeks before, I was sure it was a leave vote. And I felt like everyone in London was wrong. But I didn't put money on it, but I should have.

I definitely should have. But yeah, I don't come from a betting family, unfortunately. So I guess what I'm talking about is this kind of reputation. that places like Hastings have, I think, in 2026. So specifically, as somewhere that, you know, the way of putting it would be, you know, Hastings is a place with real economic challenges, but it also has this very active, creative community life. So I guess as someone who's lived here for over five years,

my question to you is, are these communities that interact, are the communities that live on top of each other, how do those things live alongside each other? For example, the story that the Greens won overall control of Hastings by our council in the elections of this year, does that tell a significant story? Yeah, what would you like to say about the makeup of Hastings and how that is significant? So Hastings has all of the challenges of seaside towns that we've just mentioned, you know, the crumbling railway links.

It's really hard to get into London from here, as many people who try to commute from here have learned. We have a threatened fishing community. It's one of the UK's only beach landing fleets here, but it's completely dwindled since I've been here. And rise of second homes, lots of Airbnb here and also seasonal economies, which makes it very difficult for young people to work. And yet, we have this influx of people like me who arrived here in the pandemic with kind of London wages and, you know, creative occupations and who have made this town our home, partly because of the cheap housing, relatively to what we have. had experienced. So I think that's true to say that it is a town of two halves. And I think that's true of many seaside towns now. And the work that I document in the book, the project that I document is called the Hastings Commons. That is situated in one of the most deprived parts of Hastings. So this is

the White Rock area of Hastings. It ranks in the top 1.25% of all in the indices with multiple deprivation. So it's very poor. And it has lots of derelict. and empty space. And the Hastings Commons now is a kind of constellation of community-owned buildings. Very slowly have been brought into community ownership through patchwork of grants and funding and projects and turned over to the people who live in White Rock and the surrounding area for them to find uses for. And I think the very healing part of a project like Hastings Commons is that it starts not,

lots of very knowledgeable professionals and creative people have taken part in the Hastings Commons, but the Hastings Commons itself starts with the need of a place like Hastings. And in Hastings, the need is housing. And after the pandemic, house price is stabilised here. The waiting list for temporary accommodation has never really got under control here. And now there's over 1,000 people on the waiting list here. People are waiting, even in kind of the emergency bracket, over three years for housing. And so on the one end, you've got all these people buying up these beautiful Victorian Georgian mansions, you know, eight bedroom houses. You see them on right move. They're going for like a fraction of London prices. And at the bottom end, you have a thousand people who essentially don't have a home or a place to live. And in between that, concealed by those figures, is people who can just about afford their homes, but are also being priced out. Because their houses, whenever there is social housing, go straight to the people at the bottom end.

So Hastings Commons knew that whatever they did, they had to start with housing. And when they bought their first building, which was an office block called Rock House, the first thing they did was to put in some flats. So there's now flats on the top of Rock House. And they even set up their own letting agent called Living Rents. And this is a letting agent that other private landlords can use in Hastings to establish fair social rents, rather than to extract profit from people who just need a place to live, which is an amazing option if you're like a kind of if you have a flat here and you want to rent it out and you don't want to be a shark.

And the other thing that has to be part of the question here is young people. So recently I was writing for The Guardian about Hastings as a difficult place for young people to grow up. In Hastings, one in ten young people leave school with no plans for higher educational work, which is twice the English average. And we have the joint highest number of people aged 16 to 34 who say they are in bad hands. health according to the census. So it's a dire situation here. And Hastings Commons, rather than think about that as an external issue, have incubated a youth club using youth investment funding within the renovated printworks, which is at kind of the centre of the book, and opened it up five, maybe even seven days a week for young people to come here. And they started in the dead of winter,

literally the youth worker would go out with vouchers for hot chocolate to like car parks and bus shelters and give them to teenagers who were just loitering in the cold outside to get them to come into the space and it became this absolutely thriving youth centre Dungeons and Dragons one week they would put on raves for young people they get chance to DJ and practice production skills

things that were super experimental and maybe a bit risky but things that young people really wanted to do people, things that made young people feel they had like opportunities, a place to go, a warm place to go and like fun things to get involved in. And now the kind of fruition of that is the youth investment funding has been used to renovate a derelict sofa warehouse. We walked past it on the train station. Young people co-designed a permanent youth hub, which is just full of sofas. It's open for people to just come and sit. They don't have to buy anything.

They can just be in the warm and socialise with their friends, play board games. you know, toys for kids. So it's one of these disappearing third spaces where you don't have to pay to exist there. And that I think is the special thing about an organisation like Hastings Commons. It's opening up derelict space, but it's not prescribing need.

It's not saying we'll make profit, most profit, if we just host like co-working space or office space. It's saying the need here is housing and young people. Let's get the funding. How can we turn this space over to those needs? Yeah. And thank you so much for taking us on a little tour before we've come to this amazing beach hut, which, by the way, we should try and describe for you listeners. So in front of me is the East Sussex Tides, 2026, a little kind of infographic in front of me, which is brilliant. We've got a couple of little mirrors. We've got some bunting. The sea is to my right and Hazel's left. And producer chal is also here with us, our kind of science. silent operative in the background. And I'm sitting on a kind of wooden bench

and there's some crates underneath it. And we've also got some, what are these life boys over here? And a little kitchenette in the back. And thank you for the cup of tea hazel. But yes, what a lovely setting. And also thank you back to this point after taking us on a tour of some of these places.

And I was thinking to myself, I suppose, you know, it clearly it's possible. the story is told somewhere, I think, in progressive spaces that we are always pushing against. And I don't think that this is just a story about will. I mean, there has to be, you know, there are institutions, I guess, in Hastings. I mean, tell me more about this, that are not rushing to kind of shut these things down. I think the story that I tend to buy into, which I think your book challenges, is this idea, or I mean, I used to buy into or that is part of my assumed kind of hegemony on this,

is that every time you try and do something like this or just open a space, there is some kind of institutional kind of power that's going to shut it down, because either because of bureaucracy or because of a lack of imagination, etc. But Hastings Commons has made it possible. And yet, based on what we were saying before, I think what we're also saying is this is inspiration, but it's not necessarily replicable in every place, the same way and nor should it be because there are very specific conditions.

I mean, before we move on from the specifics of Hastings, I mean, maybe just, I'd just like to mention, because I think it's interesting for listeners, that Jess from Hastings' common in the book was talking about, she made this really interesting statement about how outpricing on the open market is the modern version of enclosures. And we're talking about housing. So, I mean, I'd love to, before we move on to other specifics, take this back to, I guess, a question of capital and taking back land, like actual physical space from capital. So maybe we can reflect on that statement just for a little bit before we move on. Absolutely. Yeah. So Jess was the commoner at large in Hastings.

She kind of spearheaded the acquisition of these derelict spaces and everything that's come afterwards. And she's the one that landed on this idea of commons or common. as a kind of doing word, a thing that we can all be involved in. And that was really the practice of involving people in renovating the spaces. Everything that she does is incremental. So the printworks that's now the observer building, certain floors are still, even a couple of years after it's opened, they're still undergoing changes and renovations. Eventually they too will be open as flats.

She has this idea of phased organic redevelopment, which is the opposite of a kind of architect's master plan. or, you know, before a council's going to put money in something, it needs to know what it's investing in. But Jess's idea is the opposite of that. It's like, no, first we get the buildings, then we see what the need is, as we've said, what needs present themselves,

and how can the community co-create these spaces in common? So the commoning is her verb for what we do in these spaces, and it is also a noun for the space itself, the Hastings Commons, the constellation of buildings. And she has this idea, as you've said, that outpricing on the open market is the modern version of the enclosures. Now, she considers these empty buildings in Hastings as common pool resources. So increasingly in many places, the derelict spaces are literal public buildings.

You know, they've been sold off by cash-strapped councils, so libraries, swimming pools, sports centres, places that are owned by the people through their taxes and that are now falling into private. hands. And she is referring when she says about the modern form of enclosure to the history of the commons. You know, many of your listeners will know that in English history, the commons were communal areas, so grassland, heathland, fens or moorland, where ordinary people who owned no land could survive and subsist by grazing animals and collecting firewood. In 1500, half of England was common land. We just had access to it. We could subsist from the land. And these rights were gradually eroded in this process known as enclosure, which was enabled by a parliament in the 18th and 19th century's parliamentary enclosure.

It basically removed the rights of ordinary people to steward land between them. Everything becomes fenced and taxable, ownable, controlled. And the Marxist feminist Sylvia Federici has done some very interesting work around the kinds of people who were shut out from. the from society when this process of enclosure happened you know this is the birth of the proletariat so when common land was destroyed people moved into working jobs your body became a kind of a saleable asset you know you can you can work for money but certain people couldn't work for money children obviously and older women especially couldn't work for money and they were forced to start going from door to door begging for firewood that they could previously have collected and that this

process emerged in tandem with the idea of witches as people who would come to your house and maybe put a hex on your family if you didn't give them what they wanted the firewood or the food or whatever. So we see that this process of enclosure is not just about the loss of land. It's a kind of enclosure of the mind. Certain people are kind of shut out from what we consider like normal society. And I think what Jess is saying when she says that outpricing on the open market is the modern version of that is that when we lose today, continue to lose public spaces, former public assets, certain people are no longer welcome in our places, in our towns and our cities and our villages. They don't have a community centre to go to or a library to go to or a sports

centre to go to. They become less visible. And they, just like older women in history, as sort of become the undesirables in a way because they're not visible anymore. And that's such an interesting way to put it. And that is a very material thing. I think this is the important thing that is coming to mind for me listening to you is that this is literally about place

in the most essential way, like where you are allowed to put your body. Exactly. You know? And where you are allowed to put your body with other people, where you are allowed to congregate. And so, and I think it's important to, not so much that I'm saying that public space is kind of mystified, but these are, we're talking about buildings, we're talking about squares,

we're talking about the right for human beings to be in a place without paying something, usually, and not for commercial enterprise. And I think so much of that has become normalized in the UK. And so for that to be central to the politics of Hastings common and what the organisation or the group or what would you call it, the collective is trying to do, is I think really radical. Absolutely. And the belief that that is possible and the social proof of achieving that,

having just seen half an hour ago all of these incredible buildings across town. And I think these places are going to become essential. parts of how we survive through increasingly hot summers, increasingly wet winters. We need, and we are seeing places from Barcelona to London throughout the States, these climate resilient hubs, literal shelters where people go when they can no longer be in their totally unsuitable Victorian terraced homes, you know, no longer adapted for the world that we live in today, or if their houses flood. we need places for people to gather and to shelter.

And many of these buildings that I document in the book are now experimenting with this dual use. So the art gallery and watch it, they are doing the work to figure out how this place becomes a climate shelter. It's an art gallery, it's got very thick walls to keep the paintings cool, essentially. So in unseasonal climate, you know, in hot weather,

people could essentially shelter there. They're even working with local art. architecture students to reimagine the building itself as a place that will be a kind of buffer against disaster. So I think one of the architecture students designed a water tower that could collect rainwater. And if there was a disaster in which watch is cut off from water, there is some reserves for the town to use within the art gallery itself. In Birmingham, they are building, they were turning a derelict factory into a neighbourhood public square, which will be a depot for recycled and biomaterials that local people and local buildings firms can use

to retrofit their homes, but also having solar panels on the roof so that they can power the neighbourhood if there is a power cut, as well as having tool, share. Lairing Labs, you know, climate shelters. So these kind of these places that we previously, or maybe we think of as maybe nice to have, you know, what is the loss of another community hall, they become essential resources and parts of our civic infrastructure in climate crisis.

And the loss of them, it's, you know, I don't think it's extreme to say. It inhibits us our ability to survive. It's interesting how, the heat this summer, especially in the south of the UK, has shifted the discourse. But what it seems to be from what you're saying and from all of these stories, as is, you know, and that's, I guess, the update on the book is that these communities have kind of already moved in a way that the government is, the discourse is shifted,

but when will the institutions catch up with the actual need, which is now or yesterday? 100%. Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit about this idea, going back to this idea of being neglected or left behind. I mean, I'm not sure. I think very, you've pointed out at several points in the book that this is perhaps not exactly the framing that some of the communities like to use for themselves, despite us talking about what has become possible kind of outside capitalism. or again, I bring back this word despite capitalism. But maybe you can comment on that a little bit

while talking about what overall you have learnt, having said all of these incredible, inspiring and detailed stories from these people and organisations about something about that response when they feel neglected. Is it that they're not understanding their situation from a framework of neglect, or as I kind of just mentioned, is it that they're moving, they're moving despite or moving before and taking action on a kind of micro local level?

And I guess I mean like neglected in the widest sense by, you know, institutions and government and, you know, the discourse or, you know, a conversation about what the need is in a seaside town. Yeah, Jess Prendergrast, who's one of the Young and Collective in Wachit, she has this idea that they're not left behind, they're left alone. And I think this can sound a bit naive in some contexts, right? That they have all these conditions of precarity and difficulty and socioeconomic need. But yet somehow they're thriving. It's definitely not as simple as that. But what she is saying is that there is so much in these places that is overlooked. And without the kind of interfering state mechanisms, even just, you know, the failing state,

you know, the state that's long ago disappeared in land. There's no local councils there really. They have unitary authorities now in Somerset. As we're about to discover here in Hastings, I think the biggest story is not the Greens winning here, which is part of that national picture of kind of Greens and reform taking over from Labour and Conservative parties. It's about losing our local council.

Hastingsboro Council, East Sussex County Council, are about to disappear. By 2028, they'll disappear entirely. And whatever happens next, we know that, you know, the authorities here are going to be consumed with that process of the bureaucracy, of setting up whatever comes next. This is a moment where communities really have to start to think

about what is important to them and to self-organise, I think. And just to explain that, the Hastings authorities are going to be replaced by a single unitary authority for East Sussex by 2028 as part of this much broader restructuring, driven by central government. they're overhauling the current kind of council system, this complex two-tier local authority system, and introducing more single-tier unitary authorities.

It's actually going to result in 134 local borough and county councils becoming just 38 unitary authorities. So many, many places are affected. But I think what it does is create a kind of policy and power vacuum in a place like East Sussex and Hastings, specifically, where communities more than ever are going to have to advocate for their access to derelict spaces, how that translates into planning, and so many of the things,

you know, right from housing to education and so on. And like you said, it'll be some kind of bureaucracy sync, in a sense. And I think that's interesting, but also I can imagine how it can, you know, there might be a good reason for this long-term project, but in,

in kind of very sharp conditions that we're talking about, I can imagine that there are going to be forces to pull energy away from, like you're saying, the housing and youth unemployment and everything that comes with that and what that creates in terms of like the flavour and experience of a town like Hastings. And I wonder if it will just kind of become a more, who's to say, the effect that this will have, but we already have these self-organising communities in coastal towns precisely because they are kind of overlooked or, you know, authorities often don't reach that far to the edges.

And I think that's what Jess is kind of getting at when she talks about being left alone. She says in liminal spaces like this, we find that we can begin to think and act in a new way. This actually chimes with what we know about communities that survive, in far more precarious conditions. So the economist, academic, John Rapley, has this new book called Icarus Economics, which states that rich, wealthy countries like Britain

are actually worse placed than other nations to cope with climate change. Because we don't have any resilience. You know, we've outsourced everything. We don't have many trades or skills anymore. What skills we have left, we, you know, bring other people in to do for us. And so in parts of Britain

where they've historically had less or been less developed, if you like, people are naturally a bit more resourceful. I think that's what Jess is saying about watch it. I saw this in the book during the pandemic. It was the first time that many of these organisations doing this really hyper-local work began to talk to one another.

I think this is a little bit what we were saying at the beginning idea about it's not all these places inventing solutions to crises in isolation. It's about them responding to the needs of place in dialogue and collaboration with other places. So during the pandemic, as we know, many mutual aid networks sprung up. Councils started deferring to these groups that had access to people on the doorstep

that could take shopping to people, elderly people or prescriptions. And we saw that in places that had been kind of left behind, if you like, or left alone, these very strong social networks served them very, very well, that they could respond to this need more acutely. And they started talking to each other. I was on these mutual aid calls and I imagine the country sort of lighting up with these kind of telephone wires almost.

And I heard people in Brighton and Liverpool talking about turning pubs over to community kitchens where they could make meals on wheels and get them out to people and different ways to take payment on the doorstep for shopping, for example, or using trust as a kind of, instead of money as a currency. And I think it is too optimistic to say that in climate,

in any kind of disaster that comes, this is what will replace it. But it does give me hope that where we have these stronger social links, often places that are overlooked, we already have the conditions to respond to disasters. Yeah. And I think it is intense. And some of the examples that you've got in the book are

and it's a very readable book but you read these examples and you think wow and my kind of emotional response was like some of these like are very difficult situations but also like how inspiring

and I inspire inspiring and hope are almost like not good enough words but I suppose you know you wouldn't have written this this book this piece you wouldn't have done this work you wouldn't have thought that it was deserved to be put in this form if you hadn't been inspired and you hadn't seen

something that's kind of peak that, I suppose, transcendental joy or the belief in the possible in the future and the way that is so difficult to find right now. So I guess my last question for you, Hazel, is, you know, what is it that after writing this book, Frontierlands, has given you a particular hope for lack of a better word or concept for the future of coastal communities or maybe one community more specifically. I think it is that we know what we need to do. You're talking about hope and inspiration.

And these are, they can feel very intangible and a little bit airy-fairy. And sometimes when I talk about the book, people say to me, oh, these are just like yuppie projects. Like nowhere, poor could ever do these things. Well, here are ten of the poorest places in the country responding to need where they live.

in ingenious ways against huge odds because they know what is needed and because no one else is doing that. And it's not in any way to overlook the extreme barriers to this work and the burnout at the level of organisation that goes on. One of the challenges of the book is that I'm trying to write in a coherent way about a decade in the life of community projects which, as anybody will know,

goes through multiple leadership changes, like multiple different parts, patchwork of grant funding and philanthropic funding. And, you know, the way the Hastings Commons works is really a patchwork of loans and grants and funders and relationships that change over time. And that's extremely exhausting to cobble that together into this incredibly beautiful project, especially in current conditions. But people are doing it.

And that, I think, is the exciting thing. And the thing that really stays with me is that only we, each of us is knowledgeable about the place that we live and able to respond to the, to the conditions of our neighborhoods. You know, Barbara Kingsolver, you know, the author of Demon Copperhead, writes a lot about rural challenges in America, a completely different context, of course, but she has this idea of rural juice, which is generosity as a survival instinct. And she's talking about somebody to help pick up.

the cotton or pick the tobacco when it comes to harvest time. A pie left on someone's doorstep. A door left unlocked visiting an elderly neighbor. And Demon Copperhead, when he goes into the cities, he says he has to like stop giving out his juice, you know, because people don't even look at you in the streets anymore. And that is a resource, a kind of valuable thing that we have in places where there isn't a thriving capitalist economy. We have this juice that we can all know.

You know, when the pandemic happened, no one wasn't taking shopping to the woman at number 10 because she voted Tory or she voted reform, you know, party politics in that moment becomes less important because it's about relationships. It's about people. It's not about narrative and what we see on our screens and propaganda. And I think that is enormously powerful. Hazel, thank you so much for coming on ACFM and talking to us about this topic. This is such a brilliant book for anyone who's not read it. Frontierlands, Britain's survival in the making by Hazel Sheffield, is now out in hardback and it will be out on paperback next year.

Is that right? Yeah, in February, absolutely. Thank you so much for coming on ACFM. Thank you so much, Nadia. Thanks for coming to Hastings. And now let's jump in the sea. Let's do it.