12:30 — Britain's Forgotten Frontierlands with Hazel Sheffield @ The Chapel

📍 Sunday 26th April 12:30 - 13:30 in The Victoria's Chapel

Hazel Sheffield is a business reporter and investigative journalist. Before going freelance, she covered derivatives for Euromoney and worked as the business editor of the Independent. She left the Independent in the summer of 2016 to start a grant-funded project called farnearer.org, documenting self-organising communities and economic alternatives in the UK. After a decade of reporting, that work has come together as Frontierlands, her first book. She lives with her family in Hastings.

Synopsis for Frontierlands

'Frontierlands' are Britain's forgotten places. Silt-filled harbours, overgrown forests, sunken railway tracks and empty buildings. All once economic engines, now abandoned by investors and the state.

But they are home to local communities, and amongst them, some remarkable pioneers working together to repair, rebuild and prepare for the future.

Hazel Sheffield takes her readers on a journey that begins at the coastline and travels inward via hoardings and railway arches, factories, streets and neighbourhoods to our homes. Moving from Watchet harbour in the South West to Gateshead in the North East, from Lancashire to London and the South East, she introduces us to the people who are acting to shape their own destinies - people with first-hand knowledge of the problems Britain faces and with clear ideas how to make things better.

This is a book about regeneration, reclaiming power, and the hope that comes from community action. About people questioning how the world works and determined to do things differently in the face of economic upheaval and climate crisis. People learning to build a new world, challenging us all to think about how we should live in the face of certain change.

Immersive and inspiring, Frontierlands challenges us to reconnect with and reclaim our environment, showing that it is possible to regenerate, reskill and create opportunities for industry, and to address the challenges of climate change.