2012
Individuals
- Take-up of evening classes in practical and craft skills starts to rise
- The ‘Totnes Got Talent’ event in Totnes gets hundreds of people across the town practising their acts, learning songs, practising dance routines. The final show, in the Totnes Civic Hall, is a complete sell-out, and generates huge interest. The winners, a dance act called ‘Massive’, become local heroes and go on to become well known nationally.
Community
- A wave of café culture and buskers hits the streets as more people have time on their hands with unemployment affecting all age groups. Cafés are becoming more of a central aspect of local life, with the board game evenings and community dinners started in the Red Wizard in Totnes really catching on elsewhere. The 2012 Totnes Monopoly Championships is declared a draw, when, in order to reflect the changes taking place around them in the world, they decide to form a co-operative and work collectively for each other’s benefit. The judges and organisers are not happy with the outcome, but Brian Lawson, one of the finalists, tells the Totnes Times, “it occurred to us during the first tea-break of the final that actually Monopoly reflects the thinking in the world that is partly to blame for the economic situation we now see, the crash that began in 2008. We felt, given the profile we have here, that we wanted to model a different way of approaching economics. It makes Monopoly more boring to play, but it has certainly got people talking.”
- The media is reporting a lot of stories about local innovation, as people seek to accommodate solar panels in odd places, and in some cases engage local artists to help them design the most striking and eye-catching way to install them. Local photovoltaics company BecoSolar engage local designers to create a range of limited-edition ‘designer’ solar panels, which help to make photovoltaics the ‘must-have’ additions to houses. To talk of ‘payback periods’ for photovoltaics becomes as ridiculous as to talk of ‘payback periods’ for cars or holidays
- The Totnes Pottery opens in one of the new light-industrial units on the ATMOS development. The rising oil price has meant that what had been cheap imports of crockery from China and elsewhere are now very expensive, and the Totnes Pottery opens as a social enterprise based on the idea of making plates, bowls, cups and so on, not as highly priced artisan items, but as affordable, mass-market everyday items. The designs are modern and colourful, and the imprint on the underside, “Thrown in Totnes”, becomes iconic
- Totnes Art & Design Foundation course at KEVICCS expands and is to include a full three year degree course. Director Bruce Timson is delighted, telling Art Quarterly, “this course is so different from others in the UK as it is so personal and students engage at very deep and meaningful level; they bond and work together. The holistic and eco-artwork opens all our eyes to what is happening below the surface.”
Policy Makers & Service Providers
- Devon County Council’s Arts officer makes a range of grants available for community arts in response to the growing unemployment figures. This year’s projects will be displayed during the Totnes Festival
- Totnes Library gets a new home in the former Boots shop on the Civic Square, a major expansion with a discussion café, smaller reading rooms are set up in outlying villages in conjunction with the new biodiesel-powered mobile library. The Transition section, begun in 2007, continues to expand, and is by now a major resource for the area to find out about all aspects of sustainable living.
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