After years of effort, BEC’s partners Ambition Lawrence Weston are celebrating their thriving new community hub as well as the first payments from their onshore wind turbine. We spoke to co-founder Mark Pepper to hear about their journey.
Mark Pepper leads the way through an immaculately clean and cosy building. “This is our community library,” he says, gesturing to packed bookshelves and several colourful sofas. “Our local library was shut down some time ago. Lots of people come here and use the books.”
The library is among a stack of services hosted in the new £2.2 million community hub, an energy efficient building with air source heat pumps, solar panels, underfloor heating, EV charging points and Mechanical Ventilation Heat Recovery in the fitness hall. It hosts a huge range of practical support for local residents, from debt and rent advice, mental health support to fitness groups, ESOL courses and parenting classes.
“There’s an abundance of stuff, you name it, we do it,” Mark says.
The centre was built through the blood, sweat and tears of local residents in a journey that took over a decade and was powered in part by community-owned energy.
Hopes and needs
The story started in around 2010, Mark says, when a group of residents got fed up seeing services dry up in their local area, and a feeling that they were “the forgotten estate in Bristol.”
“We come together thinking no one else seems to be wanting to help us, no other politicians or decision-makers, so we need to get off our backsides and try to improve the place ourselves.”
The idea was to get a sense of people’s hopes and needs for the area in which they lived in the form of a five-year Community Development Plan. This involved training up a group of local people to go door-knocking on every house in the estate with a set of three questions: What’s good about Lawrence Weston, what’s not-so-good and what needs changing?
Unlike other consultations and surveys residents had come across in the past (where people “parachuted in with their own agenda”, Mark says), this time, it was neighbours asking neighbours. “That’s the beauty of training up our local residents, we all have a vested interest in what we were doing,” he adds. “Also, you get a much better response if you’re being interviewed by a fellow resident. You’re unlikely to slam the door in their face because you’re going to bump into them tomorrow.”
As well as door-knocking, the group delivered leaflets and arranged meetings and kept everyone informed through word of mouth. After 18 months, once the plan was put in place, they received a boost in the form of the Localism Act, legislation aimed to give local authorities more power over decision-making. This gave their community plan legal clout.
“So for example, the residents wanted to see a new community building. So we could then allocate some land to be built only as a community building,” Mark said. “The hub we’re in now was a college before. They knocked down the college because it was deemed too old, a lot of investment, but when they knocked it down it took away a lot of social infrastructure, that was the key reason we came together as a group of residents to form Ambition Lawrence Weston in 2012.”
Around this time, BEC approached ALW to work together on a nearby community-owned solar farm project. In exchange for their support, residents would receive profits from the farm.
“There’s money in this green energy lark”
“That’s what really got us going on the renewable energy journey. The lightbulb lit up – the LED lightbulb, obviously,” Mark says. “It said, there’s money in this green energy lark so let’s see if we can develop a sustainable income to put this Community Development Plan into action.”
Next, they set their sights on building a wind turbine. With the help of technical experts and community organisation Bristol Energy Network, the plan was put into action. It took four years of more hard work to build support to get around the highly prohibitive planning restrictions. They held events, knocked on doors and found creative ways to have open conversations, like showing people a pedal-powered skalextric. It paid off. There were no planning objections, and after a struggle getting the development finance together, in 2023, the turbine was completed. The first annual payment of around £100,000 came through in February this year.
For many residents, the climate and geopolitical crises are a world away as they battle the pressures of everyday life. What matters most to them is seeing positive changes being realised where they live.
“They [residents] can see the new community hub being built, the four new playparks being built, they can see the houses that we’ve raised the energy efficiency of, they can see the cycle paths and local transport we’ve improved. They sit on that shuttle bus that we’ve set up to make sure places of employment are accessible to them for the first time in a long time,” Mark says. “They can see the delivery of services here, access to debt advice, free veterinary care, knitting groups, dance groups. If you ask them, how did that come about? To be fair, without them being rude or meaning to sound it, they don’t really care. They’re getting their needs met. That’s what’s important.”
