Ways to take part include:
performance (music, spoken word, walkabout)
making decorations
hosting a craft stall
running a skills sharing workshop
sharing your homegrown produce
being a candidate for Montpelier Mayor or Queen Bean in the mock elections
helping to run silly games and craft activities
help to organise a ‘heritage lunch’ for older residents of Montpelier

On the day, we need volunteers to help with stewarding, putting up decorations, assisting with cake/bean/tea stalls and clearing up afterwards.

If you’re able to join this happy team, please get in touch!  You can see the ‘get involved’ flyer here
Sally Jenkins
Event Coordinator
montpelierbeanfeast@yahoo.co.uk
07866 748193

About the event
This community street festival is a resurrection of an annual event from the eighteenth century, which historical accounts say originally featured mock elections of a Mayor and Sheriff, ‘delighted spectators’ and ‘various high jinks’. It is now a celebration of local heritage, local harvest and local genius and features music, mock elections, crafts workshops and procession, local produce exchange, ‘homemade’ stalls and lots of neighbours getting to know each other.
The event takes place in St Andrews Road and Montpelier Park. It is free to attend, although donations towards costs are much appreciated.  All organisers are unpaid volunteers from the local area.

Can you help out with this year's Bean Feast? We need lots of people to make it a success!

A broad range of homes will be showcased in over a dozen neighbourhoods such as Montpelier, Easton, Redland and Fishponds where visitors will be able to see and discuss the changes, refurbishments and renewable installations with the householders and learn from their experiences. These homes will be clustered around hubs such community centres or libraries with publicity, displays, energy advice and workshops.

Homes to be featured include some of the homes on the Refit West scheme, super green refurbished student accomodation, a Montpelier house with hemp and lime walls, housing association flats in Redland and state of the art new builds. There will be something for everyone.

Huge support is gathering for the event which came about partly due to a meeting set up by Transition Montpelier at the Fairfield Resource Centre in February. A significant collection of partners have now come together to make the event happening including the City Council, the EnergySaving Trust and Transition Bristol.

Bristol Green Doors is set to become a major feature of the city’s calendar. There is a website www.bristolgreendoors.org which has lots of information including a page for householders who may be interested in taking part. COULD THIS BE YOU AND YOUR HOME? Please take a look and pass the information on to anyone who you think may be interested.

For more on Transtion Montpelier Energy Group click here

The next outdoor session will be Sat 29th May 10am to 3pm in Picton Square.  Come and tell us what you like and don’t like about urban greening so far, and what you want to see in the future!

The next planning meeting for those who want to help coordinate activities and find funding is on Weds 26th May at 8pm.  Please email shiona_macp@hotmail.com for location details.

27% of the UK’s CO2 emissions are from our homes. This needs to be reduced significantly.

We had an excellent day and our enthusiasm and passion was commented on by our trainer Bev. Comments from some of the delegates include: “Thanks for the great event on monday”, ” I really enjoyed the part of the course I attended on Monday-thanks for organising it”, Monday was an excellent day, Thank you”.

The training course content was put together by people from Transition Montpelier’s energy group (TMEG) and the Easton Energy Group and is strongly informed by the success of the Household Energy Service in Shropshire who have just been awarded a significant grant to furthur the excellent work they are doing with communities in their county. We are hopeful that this training, combined with some significant other work going on in Bristol, can hasten the way forward to our city becoming more energy efficient, secure and sustainable.

Futher information:

Cavity Walls

Programming Central Heating

The follow up document from the training here features links to many other useful sites.

Planning permission has been applied for the whole Park, and is currently being considered. The plan submitted is here. It is due to be decided upon by the end of April. The work has been put out to tender, and prices are due to come back in the first week of April.

BT have now removed the telephone kiosk, and we plan to infill the hole and match the wall to the surrounding when funds allow.

The Community Cashback fencing is now installed, and as the tendering prices came in below budget, the £10,000 has also funded new drop bollards at the entrance and new self-closing gates at the pavement to prevent children running out on the road, and dog signs for the playground.

The fence is not as high as we would have liked, so we are working with the council to raise it; the funding had to be spent by March, so they ran out of time to get planning permission for a higher fence.

We met with the Council this week to discuss progress, and may have made a breakthrough on the issue of the land strip within the Park that is not owned by BCC. As this land has been untended for 9 years, BCC legal department had been advising that we do not contact the owner and wait for a further 3 years to enable them to apply for possession. BCC have now changed their stance, and we are hoping to meet with the owner of the strip soon. We aim to secure their permission for work on their land, which will enable us to secure the Biffaward £50,000, and enable us to continue applying for further grants. Without their permission, grant funds cannot be spent on their land.

We are currently working hard on the Lottery bid to reclaim the rear wasteground, which is due in on May 12th. This is a standalone project on council land, so will go ahead regardless of whether we manage to resolve the ownership / permission issue of the land strip.

We are still waiting for a reply to our letter from Jon Rogers about the chronic underfunding of Montpelier’s parks. Hugh Holden of the Bristol Parks Forum also raised the issue with Tracey Morgan, the new manager of the Parks department. If you feel like dropping them your own note about it, their email addresses are: jon.rogers@bristol.gov.uk and tracey.morgan@bristol.gov.uk.

Happy Easter!

Simon, Shiona, Will and Piers

The Mapping Day on Sunday went very well, with about 30 people in attendance and everyone enjoying the walk and cakes.  Many people felt uncomfortable identifying gardens as ‘untended’.

ACTION:  Pete to compile an overall map of Montpelier from the individual ones we walked with, to be published here, excluding the untended gardens as we felt this was more subjective and potentially insulting.

ACTION: Sally, Ingrid and Claudia to design a community gardening space in the grafitti wall / bench corner of Montpelier Park for the Lottery funding bid.  Andy Spargo (park landscape architect) is happy to draw this up formally for us, but needs to have it by end April.

Six potential ‘hotspots’ were identified:

1. Station (platform, embankment and approach)

2. Rainbow Bridge (Fairfield and Hurlingham sides)

3. Picton Square (between Bells and Gallifords)

4. Coburg Corner (meeting Ashley Hill)

5. Rosa Parks Lane (at Albany Green)

6. Magpie (Picton St / Ashley Road)

The issues for each hotspot were briefly discussed, and it was agreed to focus on those where there were clear ‘adopters’ taking responsibility for the area to ensure we don’t spread ourselves too thinly in the early days.  The first three hotspots were chosen by the group.  If someone wants to take responsibility for any of the other hotspots (or indeed, any other area – we were short on attendees from around Albany Green), we will be happy to support them too.

We then split off into hotspot groups according to our interests, and discussed how to get things moving.

Station: (Sally, Lucy, Steve) Holding two action afternoons to initiate planting w/c 26  April or w/c 3 May.  Lucy to contact Period Fireplaces regarding triangular strip.  Shiona to contact Miles Harris to establish land ownership and block grass cutting.  Sally to contact Eastside roots re Network Rail.

Square: (Shiona, Ingrid, Karen, Simon, Esther) Holding a May Day consultation and planting event, with a waterbutt installation workshop, planter building session and inviting design ideas for the space.  Esther identifying cost savings to businesses if recycle waste.  Meeting Fri 26 to speak with business owners re bin issues.

Rainbow: (Chris, David, Claudia, Danny, Mima)  to make contact with Mary Bright and discuss her plans and the best way to work together.  Sally/Claudia to approach Fairfield School to initiate work in playground.  Shiona to contact Miles Harris to establish land ownership and block grass cutting.

ACTION: Shiona to send round an email regarding a group name.

Steve’s leaf image was liked by everyone and picked for use on posters and signs.  ACTION Steve to forward blank leaf image to group for use in posters etc.

ACTION: Shiona, Danny and Karen to look for funding, with Quartet, Network Rail and greenspaces as a starting point.

As well as our most valuable resource – people power (!) – we are also in need of materials to transform these spaces. If you have anything to offer, or know of a great place to get things (either for free or at good value) then please let us know by posting a comment below or emailing shiona_macp@hotmail.com.  The most obvious items we will need are:

• Compost
• Well rotted manure
• Top Soil
• Wood and other materials to make raised beds
• Screws/nails etc
• Water butts (or equivalent)
• Seeds
• Plants
• Trees for replanting
• Organic plant food (eg comfrey tea, seaweed extracts)

Any ideas on sources of funding for these items would also be extremely welcome!

Many thanks, the Growing Team

The aim is to identify:

• existing green space (however small)
• potential hard space for planters or digging out
• potential green roof space
• untended gardens to approach to offer assistance and/or gardenshare

Action points from the meeting are here; our next meeting will be Thursday 25 March at 8pm in the Old Fairfield School to discuss the results of the Mapping Day.  We will aim to focus our energies on a few ‘quick win’ areas of Montpelier to demonstrate what’s possible over the next few months, with the goal of creating a Trail across the whole area over the next few years.

Miguel’s talk kicked off a lot of excellent thinking and discussion about energy within a group of about 35 people which included locals wanting to start an energy group for Montpelier, representatives from a range of Transition initiatives from around Bristol, and people wanting to improve their homes and / or learn about the feed in tariffs and solar PV. Following introductions, 35 people split into four groups and discussed

• Home Energy Efficiency
• Solar PV and the feed-in tariff
• How communities can work on energy
• If we wanted a wind turbine for “our” community, what would we do?

Click on here for a combined report with actions in PDF form for all these groups .

There was an excellent atmosphere for which we have received some really positive feedback. Resulting from the meeting, we now have at least 12 people wanting to be part of the Transition Montpelier Energy group, five of whom are training to be home energy auditors in March. This is an excellent start. We will be meeting soon and looking at the action points suggested and making plans together for how we bring this forward in our neighbourhood. Click here if you want to contact this group directly.