Secondary Glazing in a Listed Building

My family moved into our three-storey Georgian house in the country when I was four, and we all saw it as a great investment. What a wonderful place for the children to run around in, to play hide-and-seek and to keep out of each other's way, and out of the trouble of a town street corner! We could create beautiful gardens, use the land productively and enjoy the serene country life! But naturally, at the time, energy was much cheaper than it is now, and energy efficiency wasn't really a concern.

Now that we have lived with it for over twenty years, we have seen the weak spots, suffered many a freezing night and put up with howling draughts. We've progressively added insulation and draught-proofing measures over time, but the house still gets cold.

The thing is that the house is Grade II listed. This, in my opinion, is a good thing. It's great that we have a way of protecting our heritage and respect the fine work of our forebears! The appearance of the house owes a lot to its oak-framed windows, and replacing them with UPVC double-glazed ones would look ugly and severely lessen our built heritage. However, listed building status does mean that even highly justifiable changes that some people can make "willy nilly" to their homes requires us to apply for special permissions.

But we've found a solution to the window problem!

Can you see it?

No, didn't think so. When looked at from afar, this looks just like the single-glazed, oak-framed, leaded casement window as might have been present when it was first built (although the ones actually installed are much newer!). But there were problems. The steel frames around the casements have a tendency not to fit well against the wooden frame, and leave gaps where draughts get through. And then there's the "waterfall effect" as my dad calls it. This is where convective circulation of air in the room is caused by the waterfall of air being cooled by the window and flowing over the sill to the floor.

To rectify these points, we firstly installed new seals. This reduced draughts and also helps to reduce "cold-bridging" (conductive heat transfer through solid elements) between the frame and the casements.

We also installed secondary glazing. This is NOT double-glazing. Secondary glazing is simply another layer of glass (or in our case, polycarbonate), separate to the window, which is attached to the inside of the window frame. Because the glass is on the outside edge of the window frame, this leaves an approx. 45mm gap of air as an insulating layer. However, the main thing it does is eliminate the waterfall effect because the layer of polycarbonate is not much cooler than the indoor air, and a convective cycle is not generated within the room.

Although we've only lived with these new measures during part of last winter, we've already felt the effect it has on the warmth of rooms and the reduction of draughts. I'm looking forward to seeing the effect it has over an entire winter season!

The polycarbonate is fixed using screws in oversized holes in the polycarbonate (to prevent concentrated stress in the polycarbonate and therefore cracking) with oversized washers to spread the load, into metal inserts (specially made) which have been installed into the window frames. Because the polycarbonate panels are screwed in place rather than glued or nailed, we can take them off easily for maintenance, opening of windows during summer and to show what the house may have been like more accurately in times gone by.

If anyone wants to replicate the measure, or just to find out more about it, I'd be happy to answer any queries on our methods via the comments box below, or by email - simeon [at] simeonjackson.co.uk.

UPDATE (6 FEB 2014): Lots of people who've read this post have asked about what the little inserts are and where to get them from. I'm afraid that the type we used were specially made and designed to be as unobtrusive as possible when the secondary glazing was not installed. However, you can get similar products off-the-shelf from manufacturers like Hafele.

Photos: The Georgian façade; Sitting room window; Corner of window with polycarbonate and a fixing point visible; Screw, washer and insert.

Nice priest holes – shame about the heat loss

I live in a dormer bungalow built in 1968. Many houses of this style were built in the 1970s and they can be seen all over Norfolk. The design owes nothing to architectural quality or to energy efficiency but everything to low construction costs. It is much cheaper to build roofs than walls. The consequence of having all that roof space is lots of upstairs cupboards but also several large inaccessible spaces that we call ‘The Priest Holes’ , where wind and mice are free to circulate. Energy was cheap when these houses were built so no effort was made to insulate the Priest Holes but they should be treated the same way as the loft but with the extra job of insulating the vertical wall.

Access to the Priest Holes can be gained through the backs of the cupboards that are built into the roof space – in most cases the cupboard walls are just hardboard tacked onto a wooden frame – but take care that no wires or pipes have been attached from the other side ! If you are not too large, you can then crawl into the space and put some insulation between the joists and up against the vertical walls.

The picture shows that I have put down boards as I also had to sort out some wiring problems in there. Two warnings – wear dust masks and protective clothing and make sure that you don’t trap the cat in the ceiling space. It is best to keep the cat well out of the way!

You don’t need to insulate above the ceiling where it is below the upper room as heat will pass through into the bedroom – just like in a normal house – also don’t completely fill the gap between the ceiling and the floor boards as it is important to let air circulate. Ventilation is not normally a problem in these houses as the wind can pass from one side of the house to the other through all the linked roof spaces – on windy days the cupboard doors rattle in a ghostly way.

Insulating the priest holes is a lot of work but well worth doing to reduce heating bills and to keep the bedrooms cooler on hot days. I have also increased the insulation in the main loft and in the flat dormer roof. The picture shows the additional metal flue for the small wood burner in my office, the brick chimney serves a larger wood burner in the lounge that we light at weekends. Either one of these stoves keeps the whole house warm on really cold days. We are fortunate that the house faces south and the large porch window collects a lot of solar energy.

If you do venture into your Priest Holes, please don’t get stuck and do make sure that someone knows where you (and the cat) are!

It's not about the building

This week's blogging will feature transitioners showcasing things we have done to our homes to help us be lower carbon users.

As I write this, my trusty woodburner has been dormant for several months, and seeing it in the photo here, makes be look forward to the cooler and colder times ahead!

Lance Armstrong, the cyclist from Texas, famously wrote a book entitled 'It's Not About the Bike'. As I reflect on what I have done in my own home, and looked at the energy bills steadily tumbling, I realise that this has been achieved as much through my own behaviour change as through doing small technical bits and pieces to my house. Or more precisely, it is through the relationship between the technical bits, and me as a person.

So....when I installed a standard water butt (30 quid) to feed my loo with rain water,( featured in a previous blog) I began to become much more aware of water usage generally, and found myself doing things which I had not thought of before - often simple things like capturing the run-off when running my hot water tap, rather than let it down the drain. The overall result is that I pay £5 a month for my water.

I live in a typical Norwich mid-terrace Edwardian house, sometimes regarded as a nightmare for 'greening up'.

However, given most of us are not in a financial position to build our own, we're faced with looking at what we have, and what we can do....and the solutions are sometimes surprising.

That rather large window you can see there in the bay - sadly modified in the great 60s rush for demolishing all things past - does now in fact have a retro-fitted sealed double glaze in it. So rather than replacing the window - which is what many a double-glazing company try to sell you - I replaced the glass in the existing frame. For the technically minded it is a 'stepped double glaze' unit, with argon filling and K-float on the inner glaze. Because it is south-facing, in the low winter sun, I find that the room now warms to a nice 18 or 19 degrees from solar gain, when the outside temperature is only 1 or 2 degrees, with no internal heating on. That is helped by the underfloor insulation I have installed under the floorboards.

So... for the rest of this week, we will be hearing from Mark on the subject of sheep's wool insulation and Council grants, Simeon on how he managed (with his parents) in no less than a listed building, John on the vagaries of dealing with a 1970s bungalow, and James, as guest blogger on the CPRE Green Buildings open days as a whole. James Frost of CPRE has been the inspiration in setting up the Open Days which showcase individual buildings of a huge variety throughout Norfolk. It has been so successful, that other regions are looking to replicate the model - James will be writing about this on Friday. (See : http://www.cprenorfolk.org.uk/greenbuildings/tours). On Saturday Charlotte will be reflecting on the world of Transition interiors and looking at Stefi Barna's (Magdalen Street Celebration) retrofitted house in NR3 and a strawbale designed and built by Carol Hunter and John Preston from Downham Market and Villages in Transition.

As a blog reader, please get the questions and comments flowing, as there will be some nice juicy, gritty, practical stuff coming up this week!

Please forgive me if I gloat a bit ..

I know that the Little Melton Village Show is not the most prestigious event in the vegetable growing world but I was very pleased to get a certificate in each of the six classes that I entered yesterday - I gave my prize winning cucumber to someone, along with its certificate. The tomatoes are really a Transition effort as both plants were grown from seed by fellow veg grower Jane and the seeds for the Black Cherry came from Sue, who is also in Transition. Someone told me yesterday that John Innes are currently researching black tomatoes as they have increased levels of anti oxidants - we are clearly in the avant-garde of tomato growers!

I always enjoy the village show and seeing what other people have grown. There is a spirit of friendly rivalry but no one takes it very seriously and most people just exhibit whatever is looking good on the day. It is also encouraging to see many children taking part and that the village allotments are very popular, both with people brought up in the countryside and with people working in city office jobs.

I'm now enjoying eating a prize winning pear!

Autumn Journal: Foraging for Abundance

Outside there is the most extraordinary sunrise. The sky is crimson pink over the sea, full of long clouds like flames edged with violet. It’s completely still. I've stumbled out of the tent to come upstairs to write and have been mightily distracted from my task. It has been beautiful for the last two days, warm and misty and embracing. After a tough and grey August, September has arrived with all its bright fruit and luminous skies. You can uncurl yourself in such mellow weather and never want the day to end.

Two crucial lessons I’ve learned about English summers: 1) take advantage of the lovely moments and store them up for the long dark months ahead, and 2) don't do this with your mind, do it with your body. The body is intelligent in ways our heads are not. You can look out of the window and say to yourself hmm nice sunrise and go back to the computer two minutes later, but looking at views keeps nothing of value or well-being. You can store the thought of sunrise but not the experience. And when it comes to earth matters experience is what counts. To store up sunlight and warmth you have to go outside, swim, walk, sleep under stars and get in synch with the elements. Taste rain, feel bark, eat fruit.

SAMPHIRE Reading Elena’s post last month about recognising the shift of season with the sound of jays I was shocked to realise that I had hardly been out in the wilds this summer. So I went down to the marsh and there the blue-eyed birds were, hollering in the oaks, the ground full of spilt acorns. The flowers were still there too - angelica and marsh thistle - honeybees gathering nectar and pollen from musk mallow, watermint and bird’s foot trefoil. Later, encouraged by listening to Fergus the Forager at Uncivilisation, I walked home from Southwold along the Blyth, snacking on sharp and salty sea beet leaves and reddening samphire, gathering blackberries, elderberries and damsons for that dark autumn porridge experience at breakfast. The tracks were full of scented sea asters and wormwood and the air with sounds of migration: holidaymakers flocking back to the city, barnacle geese arriving from Siberia.

BLACKBERRY What was striking about Fergus was the way he imparted plant knowledge. He was speaking in words, but most of what he was saying came from his direct physical relationship with the natural world. You could tell by the way he stood alongside the three humble and vigorous plants he chose to talk about – hogweed, nettle, bramble – that he spent his life searching the undergrowth in the wind and the rain, chopping and tasting and experimenting in a field kitchen. He loved the plants for their usefulness, for the way they were constructed, but also for their beauty. "It’s about being creative," he said and handed round a little jar of blackberry stem stars, which he had made from cutting bramble shoots crossways in April when they were still bendy.

HAZEL In between the intellectual debates and discussions at the festival I found a physical workshop outside the Doing Space Yurt called Embodying Uncivilisation, which (as far as I could tell) was all about getting out of your mind and instead walking and talking with your whole body. As soon as you allow your rigid body to become bendy and free, let your eyes take in everything around you, your feet feel the ground beneath you, that introspective unkind thought-realm we spend most of our time in ceases to engage your full attention. Instead you turn your consciousness inside out and start to absorb your natural environment, aware of light, sound, atmosphere, scent . . . those are the things you remember.

Uncivilisation was about sitting by fires, walking through the dark woods, sleeping in the open as much as it was about intellectual exchange. My first conversation was with Martin and Mary Kibble-White about their improvised rocket stove (made from a coffee tin and an heirloom kettle) and the supple hazel branches Martin was collecting for his workshops on hurdle making.

DAMSON Downstairs the kitchen table is full of fruit and the chest of drawers covered in stalks and small brown envelopes full of seeds - dill, parsley, fennel, sunflower. This week we went to Cathy’s to pick apples for the Waveney Greenpeace Fair tomorrow (we’re running the Transition Tea Tent with Nick) and damsons for jam. Cathy runs the Abundance project for Sustainable Bungay, which gathers fruit from neighbourhood or garden trees that people don't need for themselves and redistributes it to those who do. In our neighbouring initiative in Beccles this has become a full-on community project. With us it’s a smaller venture. We have Abundance tables at all our events, giving fruit away at our Happy Mondays and Bungay Bees events, exchanging at our Give and Take Days and Garden Produce Swaps in the Library community garden. All part of the gift culture intrinsic to Transition. In Cathy's small orchard the plum and gage trees were bowed down with fruit. How come, I wondered as I picked the local giant Norfolk Beefings, our minds are so full of lack and loss and our trees are so full of abundance?

SEA BUCKTHORN Now I’m going down to the sea to have breakfast in the dunes with Mark. The sun is up. Afterwards I’m going to make a tincture from those sea buckthorn berries we gathered yesterday (a very sticky and spiny experience!) for a winter tonic. The handsome wavy-leaved sea buckthorn grows all along this coast, sometimes as a windbreak in coastal gardens, and its orange fruit is sharp and tangy and has a distinctive scent almost like passion fruit. They are a kind of Transition "superfood", packed with minerals and vitamins (15 times the amount of vitamin C in oranges). I say Transition because most of these powerful anti-oxidant berries, like goji from China or blueberries from the States, are high-carbon and expensive to buy. Sea buckthorn has been used for centuries in the East and in Siberia as a medicine (mostly as seed oil for the skin) and it grows here well and, like those other great tonics, beetroot and elderberry, is incredibly cheap. Free in fact. The tea from the leaves and berries is delicious too and they are great sprinkled in a slaw. Check them out!

Collecting Norfolk Beefing apples from Cathy's orchard; scarlet samphire, Walberswick; damson tree, Ditchingham; Fergus Drennan at Uncivilisation; sea buckthorn, Southwold

Coming Round The Dark Mountain Part 2: the Shaman and the Village

“If Transition is the village, Dark Mountain is the shaman.”
(Patrick Andrews)

I’m having a conversation with Vinay Gupta, designer of the Hexayurt and SCIM and a consultant on State Failure solutions. It's just after our Where Do We Go Now session at the Uncivilisation Festival where Vinay had suggested that Dark Mountain was the literary wing of Transition and naturally speaks to people in the movement,"certainly those who are more restless". I was intrigued as to how he brought these two strands together and we’re having a jam with Patrick Andrews from River Simple and a young man who is listening on the edge from Transition Reading:

“Transition relies on consensus,” he points out. “Dark Mountain is something you can visit, Transition is something you live.”

Afterwards I talk with my fellow Transitioner about Living Without A Fridge and we laugh about the trials and tribulations of cooking seasonally and eating a lot of cabbage.

Image by Jim Clarkson

There are a lot of Transitioners at Uncivilisation from all over Britain, from Reading, Hereford, New Forest, Brixton and Wales. There’s all the intensity of a Transition debate here but without the concerns of the Village, worrying about whether “the community” is going to come to your event, or understand you, or fund you. No battle with the Council, no struggle to get Other People to do stuff. No psychology or sitting around in a circle talking about your feelings. Everyone understands you. Peak oil and climate change and financial collapse are a given and I’m experiencing a fluency amongst the Dark Mountaineers where I often feel tongue-tied in Transition, based as it is in academic discourse and science, in practical skills I don’t have. Everyone I meet at Uncivilisation is an individual with a collective story to tell: a poet from Scotland, a professional forager, the captain of a Greenpeace ship, a designer of hydrogen cars, a researcher into Luddite history. It’s the café I wanted to walk into ever since I first read about existentialism when I was 16.

Sitting around the fire, listening to these stories I realise that where Dark Mountain differs fundamentally from Transition is in its language. The Shaman knows all about creativity and the earth and the way one is a direct link to the other. He doesn’t do data or flip charts or use corporate terms like brand or income streams or talk about people being off-message. He is a right-brain intellectual, sees existentially in time and space and lives with death at his shoulder. None of his subjects are discussed inside the Village, which is maybe why later when I interview Dougald Hine, (co-creator of Dark Mountain) we talk about taboos and how Uncivilisation is a place where those taboos are deliberately lifted and everything is allowed. He calls that space “sacred”, which is a difficult word hedged as it is with religious beliefs and spiritual fantasy. I’m not sure what I would call it, except when you’re in it you know it. It’s like stepping out of the house and finding yourself in the forest and a man is stomping around in the dark wearing deer antlers. Suddenly all the petty stuff disappears.

I remembered then what Nick Osborne from Transition Glastonbury had said at this year’s conference about the need in groups for someone to break the tyranny of the status quo discussion and allow us all to go deeper, how we are all trapped in talking about the world in superficial and conventional ways, even though it is falling about our ears (as Mark mentioned in his post this week on Tea Parties). It seemed that what Transition needed then was the Shaman to come round the Dark Mountain and break all those polite society taboos, to bring the whiff of the ancient aboriginal earth into those airless meeting rooms, to transmit a sense of deep time, of our rough lineage, of wild trees, of the ease and intimacy of talking about Big Subjects, without being heartless, idealistic, or controlling the outcome.

And maybe conversely what Transition can bring to the poet outside in the storm is the warmth of ordinary life. The gifts from our low-carbon kitchens and gardens. The ability to laugh about our shared enterprise. The stability you get from working steadily towards a clearly delineated goal with an organised network and structure. Having lived on the edge for over a decade I know the value of engaging in Transition: of making those efforts to become part of a neighbourhood, to communicate explicitly with everyone you meet, of not being stuck inside your inner dramas and instead learning to think and act (and write) as a social being. To hold out for change and the possibility of people waking up in time. And perhaps most of all knowing you are connected to hundreds of initiatives struggling with the same difficulties. In a word, belonging.

The problem with the shaman thing is that no-one really wants to be in that lonely position. It sounds glamorous but the reality is hard. To fine-tune the psyche of the tribe (as Mircea Eliade once defined their function) means you live at the edge of the village and everyone is scared of you and you spend your life battling with the demons of the human heart, a kind of go-between between the void and the people sitting comfortably around the fire. To live in the Village is to be stuck in the minutiae of the village and its repetitious events and tasks. You are cut off from the big narrative, you have little opportunity to talk at a deep level or connect with the wind and the dark ocean. You live in a known world and you long for all the immensity and connection the unknown world can bring. What keeps you within its parameters is the thought of suffering and being alone. Of putting yourself on the line.


One of the key fringe conversations at Uncivilisation was between people in both these very distinctive movements as we recognised their common ground. We have all had our End of Suburbia moment and know that our caterpillar civilisation has to dissolve before the butterfly can emerge. And just as Transition can’t do activism and campaign work in the way one-issue groups can, yet is able provide a stable base and communications bridge, it can have a similarly friendly and creative relationship with the dreamers on Dark Mountain. We all live on the brink of a collapsing world constructed by magicians and city architects. Our major task is to see the illusion of this high-carbon life together and create a new narrative rooted in reality. We can’t do that without each other. We need to transform and belong everywhere - inside and outside. To get to a future beyond oil, beyond ecological and financial breakdown, we all have to be shamans.

And we all have live in the Village.

Cernunnos from the performance of Liminal by Douglas Strang; Illustration by Jim Clarkson of Jim Design for Amelia's Magzine; scyther; Wild Trees from Red Thread: My Journey Through the Rites of Uncivilisation 2011 20 by Cat Lupton; poets from Edinburgh and Dublin; plan for the future on marquee wall; trailer for film Forgotten Bird of Paradise by Dominic Brown; Paul Kingsnorth at the Farewell.

Coming Round The Dark Mountain Part 1: Uncivilisation

Last month I went to Uncivilisation, a festival organised by the Dark Mountain project. Below is a report I wrote for The Independent newspaper (writer’s cut). Tomorrow I'll publish Part 2, a personal reflection on the relationship between the Transition and Dark Mountain movements.

“My name is Arthur Doohan and I’m a recovering banker”. We’re at the beginning of the Uncivilisation festival on the leafy South Downs on a sunny August weekend. 300 of us are gathered in a marquee to listen to the Collapsanomics Panel that includes an ex-Wiki Leaks worker from Iceland, a writer and hacker from the United States and a criminal justice specialist, originally from the former USSR.

Uncivilisation is no ordinary summer festival. You can find tents and music and people in sturdy footwear queuing for coffee, but there the similarity stops. People have gathered here not to escape from reality but face it and the Irish banker is opening this session on Living Through the Unfolding Breakdown with an unswerving set and setting.

It’s the second festival organised by the Dark Mountain Project, a literary movement that began two years ago with a manifesto published by two ex-journalists, Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine. Its two main tenets are that we live in a time of systemic collapse and need to engage with this crisis through narrative and stories, and secondly that we need to look at humanity from a “deep ecological” standpoint, as one among many species on the planet.

Originally the project was set up to create a writers’ journal (now in its second publication), but the manifesto has also inspired singers, craftsmen and artists and it is this mix of earth-based creativity and intellectual discussion that provides the groundbase for the festival. It’s a space that is hard to find in the everyday world. Here, Dougald Hine explains “there is room for reflection and no immediate rush for answers or actions.”

“Two years ago we were called crazy collapsatarians and now people are not saying these things any more. So much we have taken for granted is already breaking down around us. It’s clear we are going to have to get used to living in a different world than we were promised when we were growing up and that people have a deep capacity for adapting and making things work.”

Dark Mountain has been accused of being doomist, romantic and dangerous. But in spite of its talk of ancestral bones and sacred skulls and The End of the World As We Know It the mood of the weekend is ineffably cheery. There’s the kind of goodwill and openness you find when people don’t have to keep up pretences anymore and start to get engaged with Things That Matter. Where death and failure are allowed into the conversation rather than kept at bay, or turned into a therapy session. One thing is clear from the start: we are not here to be entertained or feel good. We are here to talk.

And there is a lot of talking. Intense conversations between geographically-dispersed people, swapping emails and instructions for making nettle curd and hazel hurdles. Dark Mountain is not a campaigning movement, it’s more interested in wielding a scythe than grinding an axe, and though most people here are highly politicised, the discussions round the fire and over the café tables are an exchange of experiences, rather than arguments or power struggles.

You could expect elitism and attitude, but there is none. Since no-one knows what the future holds there are no experts. There are no commercial stalls, no celebrity line up, no expensive technology. The emphasis is on imagination and craft and what we can do with what is at hand. Uncivilisation is primarily a meeting space to share knowledge and spark connections. There are workshops on low-tech skills like foraging and scything, talks about General Ludd, permaculture and mythology, readings of “wild writing”, meetings about off-grid publishing, off-curriculum teaching. People don’t just sit on the grass and watch performers, but are invited to ask questions, feed back ideas - more participants than audience.

“We’re writers with dirt under our fingernails” states the manifesto, and what strikes you is that the new narrative is not some urban dystopia, a tale told by cynical city novelists, it’s directly rooted in the materials of nature. It shares a lineage with English visionaries, dissenters and poets, and yet feels new and modern, planetary, something we are all inventing together.

The festival itself is simply designed: a marquee and woodland space for talks and music, one Doing Space in a yurt, one Free Space for self-organised sessions in a tipi. One bar, two communal fires, three (solar heated) showers. The Sustainability Centre is a suitably poetic venue, an ex-military base, now meadows surrounded by beech trees. It’s small too which gives the maximum opportunity for those key encounters and crucial conversations.

The awareness of being at a historical tipping point is what brings everyone here: writers, activists, philosophers, NGO workers, Transitioners. The faux-hippy chill-out scene you find at most festivals is notably absent. Uncivilisation bears the urgency of the times. No one is wearing fairy wings. Anton Shelapanov, brought up in the shadow of a Siberian gaol and now a resident in Tottenham, gets 15 of us to stand within a roped circle. And then 45 of us. That is what the cells were like in Russia in 1995, he tell us, and talks about the tinderbox conditions in British prisons after the riots. A young writer from South Yorkshire shakes as she tells the story about finding meaning in her community’s experiences after the Miner’s Strike. An independence leader from West Papua sings a song for the 250 tribes now being exterminated by the Indonesian armed forces, as Rio Tinto and BP ravage his ancestral mountain. He sings for the earth, for the soil, for the birds of paradise we are all losing.

“I lead my people with a tear,” he says.

Dark Mountain is about finding the light in the darkness, a new way of proceeding. It seemed the high moments all took place at night: sitting round a fire under the stars as the Russian storyteller emerged from the shadows in a bear mask ringing a bell. Hearing the feral choir laughing and howling in the woods, following a trail of lights through the trees and finding a naked man curled up round a skeleton of a small deer in a performance called Liminal. How shocking these things were and yet so familiar.

The ancestors sing life back into the bones, Sharon Blackie tell us, crofter and publisher of Two Ravens Press in the Outer Hebrides. It’s the beginning of the story of the world. Not a world shaped by politicians or by global corporations, but by storytellers and singers who make us feel at home on the earth.

If Uncivilisation was giving us a glimpse of the future we have everything to meet up for.

Uncivilisation took place at the Sustainability Centre, Hampshire www.sustainability-centre.org. Dark Mountain Journals 1 and 2 can be ordered from www.darkmountain.net.

Suitcase with programme and Wild by Jay Griffiths and woodworking tools; Dougald Hine introducing the weekend; Martin Kibble-White teaching hurdle making from hazel; writing and meeting outside the marquee; Woodland Space; Benny Wenda speaking about West Papua; Liminal in the woods. Photos by CDC and from the Dark Mountain blog.