Sustainable Bristol

Celebrating Sustainable City Living

Posted on 10 June 2011

Today is the first day of Bristol’s newest festival – Good Living Week - celebrating sustainable city living in the UK’s green capital.

Friday is all about green jobs. The Mayor of Hannover is in Bristol with a trade delegation for a Sustainable Energy Summit between the two cities looking at low carbon retrofit of buildings, deployment of solar photo voltaic cells, neighbourhood district heating systems and emerging wind energy technologies.

But Good Living Week has something on for everyone between now and 19th June. Here’s an article about the whole Festival by Peter Madden, Forum for the Future’s Chief Executive, that appeared this week in his monthly ‘Planet Bristol’ column in the Bristol Evening Post -

Bristol is celebrating Good Living Week, actually ten days of exciting events, talks and practical demonstrations to inspire you to live and work more sustainably.

This is a new festival, built around some well established events such as Bristol’s Biggest Bike Ride and the Festival of Nature, and will also have lots of smaller-scale things going on, giving visitors an opportunity to hear from, talk to, and join in with some of the hundreds of local projects that make Bristol the premier place for experiments in greener living.

My organisation, Forum for the Future, has helped pull all this together. And we’ll be running two particular strands, both of which are free. On Saturday 11^th June, you can learn about growing your own fruit and veg with the ‘Get Growing Trail’. Bristol’s vegetable growers are opening their community plots and garden gates for a special open day of tours, advice and family fun. There will be more than 20 community gardens, allotments and orchards across the city to visit.

Then, on the weekend of 18/19 June, on the harbourside, we’re helping run a Contemporary Sustainable Living Show. Set in the popular Festival of Nature, we wanted to give you a place where you could see a range of cool eco-goodies that help you live a greener lifestyle. So come on down and get great ideas and inspiration for your own home. Straight from Olympia in London, this will be the first large scale show of its kind in the Southwest.

Assuming Good Living Week is a success, we want to run it much bigger and better in 2012. Ideally, we’d like it to be for sustainability what the Edinburgh Festival is for theatre, comedy and the arts. Too many environmental events I go to leave me depressed and de-energised. I’d love to have a week where people could get fired-up by all the great stuff going on in our city, and have an opportunity to sample the best in green ideas, products and culture from across the world.

I know Bristol has some great festivals already. But there are not many that people actually travel to come to, that fill our hotels and restaurants and bring new jobs to the city. Nor do we have many festivals that are known nationally – or indeed internationally.

If Edinburgh, Cheltenham and Oxford can run festivals like this, why not Bristol?

My ambition is for us to run a green festival of international renown, that supports our economy, that brings new people and businesses here to see what we are doing, and that builds the reputation of Bristol as the leading city in the UK for sustainable living.