I’ve been working on the general outline for a bold new initiative at Albion Millennium Green (AMG) to facilitate our supporter engagement in the long term. It draws heavily from my own 30 plus years study of the built environment at city scale and various innovations across categories ranging from citizen science, architectural theory, Transition Towns, the Portas Pilot scheme at Forest Hill, Sydenham and Kirkdale, and so much more.
It’s called THINK OUTSIDE (stylized in capitals). I’m still working through what it is, what it could become and how best to present it. But simply put it involves thinking about the environment whether built or natural. And it is inspired by my contact with professional facilitators whose work is to help people talk constructively about difficult or complex topics. In many ways it is also inspired by my growing understanding of The Philosophy Foundation.
I chose today to announce it as a tribute to our late colleagues at AMG Tim Lund (1957-2023) and Fran Rowe (1947-2025) because today was Fran’s funeral at Honor Oak Cemetery. I miss them both dearly. Those who knew them understood they cared deeply about the natural and the built environment and the tensions between them. Together and with others (through our work at AMG and its many partnerships) we experienced the fragility of the patience the public has with projects which involved those tensions.
One of the great achievements at AMG back in 2013 was Bruno Roubicek’s Little Ecological Arts Festival which utilised the Green as a site of public discourse about environmental concerns through a series of creative explorations by invited artists. This animated the Green as a site of intellectual and imaginative play. In many ways it captured the ‘spiritual inheritance’ of the village green as a site of public and social engagement operating on many levels. I am indebted to Bruno for planting this incredible seed.
Some of the logic of THINK OUTSIDE as a format has its roots in several experiences I had whilst still at university where inevitably we encounter didatics in a formal setting. Although at the time we do not necessarily process them consciously.
Outside formal education there was one moment which stuck with me for decades. It was probably primed by the fact that around age 19 or so I had started to browse the popular psychology and self-help sections in various bookshops, which originated as a follow on in my earlier interest in mnemonics, positive thinking, lateral thinking and mind mapping.
I was in a church setting and after the service in an adjacent hall where we socialised over coffee a person who I didn’t necessarily know produced the book The Road Less Traveled (US spelling) by M Scott Peck and asked if anyone would be interested in attending a course over something like 8 meetings once a week (or month, I can’t remember now) based on the contents of the book. I think he was offering it for free as some kind of self-help based on his own need. Regardless of how accurate my perception of the situation was, or my memory of it now, I only recall passing up the opportunity.
But what stuck with me was the bold idea that you could take a book, and frankly I mean any book, and say to someone “let’s use this book as the basis for a short study program”. I could never let go of that simple idea.
A couple of years ago I got a pleasant shock connected to my extensive research on the historical characters nearest Albion Millennium Green of which Richard Jefferies I now speak. His biographer Edward Thomas was walking with the American poet Robert Frost and an incident sparked Frost to write The Road Not Taken. I think I am right in saying this has influenced the idiomatic phrase ‘the road less travelled’.
This article by the Poetry Foundation explains it better.