Alastair McGowan writes:

One of the major issues in sustainability is how we can live in the countryside with less dependency on transport and other economies that city life brings.

BBC Radio Four dealt with the issue this week in the Open Country series, focusing on Canon Frome Court in Herefordshire where a number of families are already living more sustainably. This means not only producing their own food but creating a sense of community and interdependency among the families who live in the 20 or so flats at the Georgian mansion surrounded by 40 acres of beautiful and productive farmland.

Canon Frome is a microcosm of the wider world, but here solving social questions in order to maintain a stable and equitable community has an immediacy both in terms of problems and their solutions. The closing comments by our own Margaret Robbins illustrate how Canon Frome is helping to address fundamental questions about the way we live:

Canon Frome “…is such a change from the established order of things – a hierarchy, and what we are trying to do in the court is really to live a very level sort of life with no one being boss or lord of the manor, or whatever. You know I think it’s just interesting over a hundred years to see a change from this sort of life and lifestyle [the baronial manor] to what we are attempting to do now…a herald of things to come, the way in which we can use the countryside in a much more egalitarian way”