Transcript from Radio Show

hosted by Totnes Climate Hub

talking about Bowden Pillars Future

with members of the team:

James Shorten,  Jerome Tait and Aleksandra Sliwa

Recorded on 3 July 2026 in Soundart Radio studio in Dartington

We'd like to ask, what is Bowden Pillars' future? Where is it?

Jerome:

Thanks, Marcia. Yes, I'm Jerome. I'm a director on the Bowden Pillars project.

I'm also involved in the core group that make a lot of the decisions around how the project keeps going and develops, and I'm also on the finance and fundraising circle. Yeah, it's a fantastic project which is community-led and it's all about creating a new community on the land. It's on Bowden Pillars farm just outside of the town of Totnes between the Kingsbridge Road and Totnes Downhill, so that side of the town.

The fields coming down from the ridge there, you can see just about anywhere in the town outside Morrison's or on the town bridge or in the Market Square. So it's very present in the setting of the town. It's a 124-acre former beef farm that was bought by a group of local people who, when it came up for sale, got together a charitable company to raise funds from local people and philanthropic lenders further away to try and make this project come into reality.

 

So it was a big fundraising project three years ago that bought the land and with the idea that this new community and farming project and a rewilding project could all come together, and James will be talking a bit more about exactly what the vision is. Fantastic. Thank you.

Okay. So what makes this different? What's your unique selling point? Sorry, terrible.

James:

We've got more than one unique selling point.

I'm James. I'm James Shorten. I'm one of the founders of the project.

I live next door at Bowden House. I'm also a director of the Community Benefits Society that owns the farm. And in my work, I'm a planning consultant who specialises in rural planning and regenerative development.

What makes us different is we bought this farm and then we asked ourselves the question what is the best thing we can do with it? And rapidly we came to the conclusion that there was more than one thing and actually an integrated project was exactly what the farm needed and what Totnes needed. So in this project we are directly addressing climate both through the way we run the land but also through the way the community that will live on the land will live. We're targeting a carbon footprint which is half the UK average.

Nature, Devon Wildlife Trust have partnered with us and we have 75 acres of the farm all the north facing land that runs right down to the edge of Totnes. It's being, well, rewilded is too simple a term. It's basically being returned to a temperate rainforest environment.

If you go up onto Dartmoor and go in those kind of valleys that are still wooded, that's what it is. It's the sort of small oak trees, rowans and so on, sort of forests that would have been all over Devon before it was all removed. So we're recreating that on the north slope but that will also have a lot of public access.

We're dealing with many crises here so we've got a nature crisis, a climate crisis, also tackling the housing crisis. We're going to be providing affordable housing, homes for 50 people to live in a completely different way and I'll talk about that later on in our slot. We're also tackling food.

So we have a kind of desperate need to grow more food locally. 35 acres of the project is food growing and split across a number of really quite innovative regenerative farming businesses and wellbeing, the wrapper for all of this, is the other thing we're tackling. There will be public access to the farm.

There will also be the ability for schools to come and share the land and of course the community themselves will have access to all of the land running right through. It's a multifunctional project because we're doing all of that simultaneously because, well, it's kind of in permaculture terms, it's stacking. If you put these things together, you get more than the sum of the parts because they all lean on each other and help each other out.

So we're joining up farming in nature. We're joining up people with nature, people with farming. It all joins up across the entire project and more than that, we're reaching into this concept of community and village.

So we're forming a community on the land, an intentional community, and we'll talk more about that later as well. We're also, we are deliberately calling it a village because village has many sort of important references and connotations for how some people want to live, how we used to live in the past, how we live now. And village is basically a system where it's land with people, with economic activity, with community.

So, there's an opportunity here to form community across the farm, the people who live there, and with the more than human because that's the thing that we often forget, that we are in community with nature every day and with the land every day. This project brings that to the fore and says it's one of our purposes to maximise the benefits that come from that. And that leads us to the next track, which is a song I'm incredibly fond of.

It's Martha Tilston. The track is called No Separation and it's about how, despite how many of us have come to live these days, the connection between us and nature is always there. And I actually sang this at one of our workshops spontaneously because it so sums up what we are.

There is no separation. And this project is deliberately targeting that to bring about an environment across the 124 acres where people can reconnect to each other, to the land and to nature.

I recently read a book by Guy Shrubsole on temperate rainforests, which, in Britain, would you believe, which was absolutely fascinating, and I really recommend it.

So perhaps you could say a bit more about the rainforest that you're planting and what that means and why it matters here.

 

Jerome:

Yeah, sure. As James just said, nature is really at the heart of this project, and we're really fortunate to be partners with Devon Wildlife Trust, who really understand about what we can do to help restore and bring back a lot of the depleted environments that we've got in this part of the country.

And the country as a whole, I think I read that book too. I found it very inspiring, Lost Rainforests of Great Britain. And what you understand when you read that book is how the western part of the country was once covered in rainforests.

And the key word is temperate. It's not a tropical rainforest that you get in South America, but broadleaf rainforests once were just about the most productive and regenerative parts of the planet. So lots of different people are doing a lot of great work around the region and the country to try and bring back parts of this.

And we're doing our bit and 75 acres is a huge part of the land that we bought quite rightly, because if we want to really start giving back to nature rather than just doing the least damage to it as possible, we need to make some really big inroads. And tree planting is one of the most exciting parts of the project that I've got involved in. We've had public tree planting days and there will be more.

Unfortunately, on some occasions we've been really badly hit by the weather. We get some brilliant weather down here, don't we? And sometimes it's horizontal rain. And we have also had some periods of drought.

But the 17,000 trees that we've planted so far are doing really well, most of them. They will be managed and they've been planted in a careful plan working with Environment Agency and Forestry Commission, which isn't all about putting trees on the land. There's a lot of space for natural regeneration, but also open space.

So when the trees have got to a certain point where they will be old enough to withstand the nibbling of deer and other wild creatures, the deer fencing that's had to go up can come down and the people of Totnes will be able to come and enjoy that as a kind of nature reserve really, whether they want their picnics and want their dogs. And it will be a real green lung on the edge of Totnes that people can enjoy. That's fantastic.

That really is a great prospect. So I'd like to ask Aleksandra about the farmland. Can you say a little bit about the farmland aspect?

Aleksandra:

I'm Aleksandra. I've been involved in the project since the very beginning. And I'm mostly involved in the village part, coordinating design and planning of the village.

But now I'm going to tell you about what's happening on the farmland. So this is another part that is already happening on the land. And a bit of a history.

When we as a project bought the land, it was a conventional livestock farm. So they used a lot of fertilizer and pesticides — you can imagine how it wore the soil out. So very first thing we did was to start bringing the soil back to life with green manure planted and the soil began to recover.

So the aim is to bring it into organic status. And what's happening right now on the farmland is really exciting. We're not farming this as one big operation, but we've started something called Bowden Farmland Collective, which is a group of local growers with each one bringing the unique projects onto the land, but all working together side by side.

So basically it's like an ecosystem of passionate growers. So we've got some beautiful experimental and really innovative projects there, like Kaspar and Yuki are growing tea here in Devon and Asian vegetables. Sid is creating edible meadows and a teaching garden.

We've got Justin breeding seeds that they cope with our changing climates. So imagine tomatoes grown without polytunnel, and he's sharing those seeds with other growers. Why this should matter to you while you listen? It's because the Farmland Collective is growing food right on the doorstep.

It's not shipped across the world. And also we envision the Farmland Collective site to be somewhere to come and learn. So imagine courses, workshops, volunteering days, to learn everything from saving seeds, composting, growing mushrooms.

Where are we at right now? So Farmland Collective is developing phase one at the moment, and more land is waiting for more passionate growers. That sounds exciting. That's to get us creatively thinking.

Right, so James, tell us more about the village.

 

James:

You were very specific talking about it being an intentional community and wanting that word village. So tell us more about that. Well, I'll start somewhere else.

If you think about new housing, very sort of strong issue at the moment. We know we've got to build more houses, and then you think about a housing estate. It's the sort of thing that most people want to try and avoid happening near them.

We tend to build really homogenous, often quite characterless, places that, whilst they might contain individual homes, do they really form a community? Do they really form a new place, somewhere you'd want to call home beyond just a place where you park the car and sleep at night? So this is about, and Aleksandra will talk more about, what it would be like to live there. What we're planning here is something for people who want to live differently. Super low carbon, close to where their food comes from, closer to each other, sort of co-housing proposal, closer to nature, but all of that while still being a 15-minute walk off-road down to the middle of Totnes.

The material we've got to work with here is a two-acre, roughly, farm yard, which is mainly concrete and modern barns. It's previously used as a beef farm. Actually, when the farm came up for sale, it was proposed to be as it normally is, split up into lots of little bits.

So the farm yard itself has development potential for quite large barn conversions. We're not going to do that. We're going to do something else.

We're planning a 50-home village, and the whole design of this place is centred around community and increasing the potential for people to interact to share things. So for co-housing, that means relatively small houses, but lots of generous space to share. So a shared community hub, but also lots of shared open space.

We are targeting 50% affordable housing. The site has quite a high value. 50% is quite stretching for us, but we're totally not-for-profit.

We're a community-benefit society with charitable purposes. So we're going to maximise the amount of affordable housing we can provide, and that's about 50% at the moment. Where we've got to on this journey so far is we're about halfway through the design process.

We've had, I think, seven or eight interactive design sessions with people who might want to live there, with the public, and so on, stretching over months. We've got architects on board. We've now got a master plan, which is fairly fixed, and we've got our initial house types, and we'll be sharing some of that material via our website soon.

We've got quite a sophisticated website now. Do go and have a look. We're in dialogue with South Hams and the planning department.

So rather than just putting in a planning application, we're working with them so that when it comes in, they're very used to what we've produced and some of it is a result of co-working with them with evolving the work we're doing. So very much wanting this to be the project as a whole to be a result of our work, work with the community, work with South Hams on issues of specific importance like planning policies and housing policy. We hope to get our planning application in by the end of the year and there'll probably be a period of, I don't know, six to nine months in which it's determined.

And we're not wanting to wait till we've got permission and wait till we've built this to also share some of the learning. There's a lot of interest in the project, not just from the local area. And so as we go along, we are hoping to find the time to share how we did it.

Not saying this is the only way to do it, but it's community-led housing work like we're doing here is very hard work. And so if we can help other groups cut some corners, find the right things to do, we're also interested to do that as we go along. Fantastic.

I can imagine that people like myself, many others who were involved in the Atmos campaign and all the work and efforts that went into that will be extremely interested in this as well.

I think it's very, very good. Can we move on to ask a bit more about how the day-to-day life will be different?

 

Aleksandra:

Yeah, happy to answer this one.

This is the question that we ask quite often. It's like, is the village different? Is it radical? Is it a different way of living? And we've been reflecting recently about this is actually getting back to a normal way of living. This is how humans lived for thousands of years.

So we're not bringing anything new. We just want to bring back something that has been forgotten and taken away by modern society. So imagine children playing outside with no need to watch for cars, food growing where you live.

So people are connected physically to what they eat and get their hands dirty on the land. Imagine older and younger people are being part of each other's lives and days like others passing on how to cook or make stuff and younger people helping them with their phones and tech, neighbours who know each other, know each other's problems, a place where it's easy to ask for help and where nobody is left on their own. So none of this is new.

We just want to bring it back. For me, what's exciting for me as an architect is seeing how the village is being designed. It actually will shape how we live.

It will shape the culture. So this is built into the physical design, which is quite exciting. We are following the principle which says private sufficiency and public luxury.

This is a phrase by George Monbiot. That means that your own home has everything you need, but shared spaces are genuinely beautiful and generous. How are we planning to do it? So shared spaces in the village, we envisioning common house for eating together, celebrating together, gardens, workshops, food hub for food preservation.

So all these places that draw people together instead of everyone disappearing behind their screens. I just wanted to add that underneath all of it is just a simple feeling of belonging and I

think this word actually describes the village, that feeling of belonging to the place and to each other. Beautiful.

And "Love Carries Me Home" is the track. Yeah, this is a song by our local lovely artist, Tallulah Rendall. Thank you.

 

James, who is it that gets to live there? Is it open to anyone?

 

James:

It's open to anyone who wants to live differently. The whole purpose of the project is really to show how we can live better within planetary boundaries, within climate limits. Because at the moment, I'm sure we all know that when we think about how do we reduce our emissions, how do we live better aligned with the climate requirements of the planet, most people think about what you have to give up.

And the whole point of the project is to show you don't have to give up anything. In fact, you're going to gain something. So we're going to be an intentional community.

That's the first thing. So if you want to live there, we're an intentional community, which means we take collective responsibility for many of the ways that the site works. When I say we, I just need to clarify that I live next door.

I'm not planning to move, actually. I'm quite happy living at Bowden House. Many of the things we hope to do in Bowden Pillars already happen in Bowden House, and I want to leave space for someone else to get the opportunity to live like some of the things that I experience at Bowden House that are wonderful for me.

The co-housing model, as we've already said, is relatively small houses, but lots of shared space. So we'll have a common house we all need to take care of, and it'll include some guest rooms and things. So when people do have visitors, they can be accommodated.

There will also be shared meals, and we'll have a food hub on the site as well, which is somewhere where all of the different growers can bring their food in, and we can process that food. We can have dining events, but it can also possibly act as a food grown on the farm, because many of the things which growers find difficult is marketing and getting their food to market. These principles will be the same for all types of residents, and I'll go through some of the more detailed things as well.

So the affordable housing, some of it will be allocated through the normal process. You'll need to be on Devon Home Choice to be eligible for that, but everybody living here will first

and foremost need to agree to live in the particular ways that will make the village work and achieve its outcomes. That also applies to all the people who gain open market housing.

Now, we're also playing with the idea we might have a fully mutual home ownership structure, which means basically there'll be a giant co-op and there will be a member of it. So across all of this, you'll be getting the theme from me, that we're bound together, we have a shared purpose that's bigger than just the individual households, which is to produce these broader outcomes and also catalyse the change in the farming and the nature recovery. None of that could have happened without the village.

The village is the kind of linchpin for this whole project. There'll be a mix of units. There'll be some one beds, quite a lot of one beds, because what's most needed in the areas tends to be smaller units.

Of course, it's more profitable to build big ones, but we're not going to do that. There'll also be some things called co-living units, which are shared houses type of arrangements, because we know that even the lowest rungs of the normal housing ladder in Totnes are a bit too high for many people to get on. So we'll be providing sort of ultra-small units in a shared house format, and we're going to have two of those.

And then there'll be a range of two to four beds, but as I've said, they're not going to be very big. We won't be having executive homes on the site. They're all going to be terraces, and they're all going to be designed to face common spaces, three neighbourhoods facing a common green, then a shared village green with a common house on it in the centre of it all.

And a commitment to things like this, 65% of the food the village eats will come from the farm. That's directly a climate issue, because a third of our carbon footprint comes from the food we eat. So if you can gain local food and be more plant-based, then you can immediately bear down heavily on your own carbon footprint.

There'll be a shared electric vehicle pool, and when I say that, you might think, well, that sounds like lots of shiny cars and vans, but possibly one of the most important electric vehicles is the electric bike. The lowest emission form of transport, including a human on a bike without the battery, if you charge the battery from solar panels, you actually emit more carbon if you're just on your battery, pushing the pedals by yourself. And it's amazing for things which are really relevant to Totnes, which is things like parking.

Think how much less space it takes to park an electric bike. On market day, well, after this show, I've got my e-bike here. I'll be back down to the market for a dosa with Kumar.

These are all binding principles, and I want to say a bit more about the carbon, because I think we've got time. So three big parts of your carbon footprint are food, I've just covered, personal travel, I've just covered that as well, and also energy, so super insulated houses and houses which are run entirely from 100% renewable energy. Plus, if we maximise the renewables we can do on site, we'll be able to provide significant contribution to the local energy club.

They're the tech bits, but the other bit of this is behaviour change. Tech change tends to get you about three-quarters of the way to carbon reduction targets, and I help write the Devon Carbon Plan, so I've got some knowledge to draw on there. The other quarter is behaviour change, which is the bit people think, oh, well, that's me having to sort of give stuff up.

But if you live somewhere where your food is surrounding you, the energy comes from where you live, and it's a place with a strong identity, with spaces for you to work, but also just somewhere you really enjoy being, and we're going to have a wild swimming pool, so that one is on the list as well. Then it's a place you're going to leave less often, and that's going to help with the transport point as well. So a strong theme of the Devon Carbon Plan is re-localisation.

You need to live kind of smaller lives, and again, that sounds like I'm giving stuff up, but if everything you need and more is within a smaller distance, you're not giving stuff up, you're gaining, and this is why we're designing a multifunctional community, not just a housing development, so that for those who live there, they're able to radically reduce their carbon emissions, which is a requirement of national planning policy that doesn't often happen. Whilst at the same time having a better life, and so in doing that, we are hoping to show that this might be done elsewhere as well. So who can live there? If you like the sound of that, that's the offer.

Now we have about 350 households who are currently expressed an interest in living there and know about all the weird things, the electric vehicles, the fact that whether you like it or not, the veg box will appear once a week, and all of that. So it's incredibly popular already, but it is open to everyone, and the process by which we make the final selection, because of course 350 into 50 is quite difficult, will be partly around planning requirements, will be partly around the other requirements that the village sets or the project as a whole sets for itself, and it will be partly about working with those who might want to live there to agree with some of the detail as well. We haven't done all that work yet, but by the end of the year we will, and so probably while the planning application's in in 2027, that will emerge more clearly, though part of it would also be in the planning application, because we want to put our kind of ideas on the table and have them considered as part of the planning application, even though they're unusual, because we think they deserve to be given credit and support, and we're going to do it anyway

So, that's very clear. You've all said so far. Just for the last bit, how people can get involved.

Jerome, maybe you could answer about the website and the newsletter.

 

Jerome:

Sure, yeah. We are open to people coming and visiting the land, and we've got various events that are coming, and more will be coming over the autumn and into the winter.

There will be more tree planting, so check in with Devon Wildlife Trust as well, but we work with them, so we will try and advertise as widely as we can things that are going on. So, we're all volunteers, and we welcome new volunteers coming along who can bring all sorts of skills and expertise and energy from outside. So, people in the town, please do come along.

We are easy to get in touch with now. As James said, we've got a brand new website, which is bowdenpillarsfuture.land. We've also got Instagram. We're on Instagram and LinkedIn.

So, we've got some fantastic storytellers, Steph and Laura and Aleksandra, who's here today, and Sid. Who are communicating on a wider canvas what we're trying to do here today, which is what the project's about. It's complicated, I think, because we've probably got across all complex.

 

There's lots of different elements to this, and it's a bit spinning plates, and we're doing okay, but we're also moving into a new phase of the project, where the planning permission will be sort of in, and we can turn more to the community building, not just the village, but also the connection with the town, which is our wider community, inviting it in and starting to explore what the land is going to be offering the town. We've got a quarry, a disused quarry down on Maudlin Road, which is empty, but we have some activities planned for there, and more could be coming. So there's a lot of exciting things happening, and we can be accessed through the usual channels, as they say, so yeah.

And you have a Saturday session at the time? Well, we have had. Yes, I've been there the second Saturday in the month over the spring. We're having a little break over the summer.

We hope to be back in the autumn, but we might look at doing a bit more with that and maybe using that as an opportunity to meet up and then go for a walk on the land or something like that, get to know people, but mainly that's there to be available to answer questions, because lots of people might have questions about the project and not know, you know, who to go to about that for various things. So, you know, that's a good place to come, and we will put that on your newsletter. Okay, thank you very much for all that.

And I think also, just to say, walk up Fishchowter's Lane. When you walk up Fishchowter's Lane, the land that, or the farm, the land that the Community Benefits Society owns is on both sides of Fishchowter's Lane. And from parts of the land, you can see Dartmoor and you can see the sea.

 

And I live very near there, and I have so many more owls of late as the critters move in to the rewilding  space. Yeah, so we're hoping to do a thing called the BioBlitz, maybe this year, but maybe next year, and we're doing some habitat surveys to see what's changed since we owned the land. But I was up there yesterday, walking through the fields and, yeah, the amount of wildlife that's returning to the land, it's vibrant, it's pulsating with insects and birds at the moment.

Thank you very, very much for coming and talking to us about Bowden Pillars.

 

Aleksandra: 

I'd like to say thank you for Totnes Climate Hub for hosting us, inviting us and giving us opportunity to talk about this exciting thing that's being created.