Rob Blackhurst

FT Magazine: April 28, 2007

When the residents of Ashton Hayes in north-west England set out to become carbon neutral they had little idea of the trials ahead - or of the international attention that would follow

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The village of Ashton Hayes, set in the gently rolling hills of Cheshire, north-west England, is the kind of place that logically shouldn't exist anymore outside of Ambridge, the sun-dappled home of BBC Radio 4's rural soap opera The Archers. Despite a diminutive population of 1,000, it has somehow retained a pub, a church, a nursery and a village hall, as well as a full platoon of Women's Institute, Brownies and Scout troops. Unlike other villages, it has not suffered any sprawling developments of executive homes on its outskirts: the green belt has halted expansion since the 1960s.

Bathed in spring sunshine and alive with raucous birdsong, the village glows with a sense of neighbourly pride. A well-fed golden retriever chasing its tail in the middle of the main road is grabbed by a passing villager and frogmarched to its owner. Residents in their Mercedes SUVs and Jeep Cherokees raise a finger from the steering wheel in salutation as they thunder past yellow cottages covered in honeysuckle.

But Ashton Hayes has hardly been preserved in aspic: 20 years ago there were six dairy farms; now there are only two. The farm building that used to house the village bull is now home to a PR agency. All around, there are signs of the economic boom that has invigorated the north west of England over the past 10 years. Unremarkable four-bedroom houses sell for Pounds 375,000. Few villagers toil the land; instead they commute to Liverpool and Manchester and work for companies such as ICI and AstraZeneca. A regular story, it would seem, of changing rural life.

Over the past year, however, Ashton Hayes has been anything but normal. It has seen politicians scrabbling to address villagers, Swedish journalists attending the pub quiz, and (this was the talk of the village) environmental campaigner George Monbiot cycling the wrong way round its one-way system. This is because Ashton Hayes, as green-coloured signs on its borders will tell you, is "aiming to become England's first carbon neutral village".

Since November 2005, when a concerned villager enlisted his friends in the project, the carbon neutral initiative has provided a textbook example of bottom-up political activism. But its limits are clear. It is voluntary: no one in the village is compelled to forsake a single flight or save an ounce of carbon. Yet in spite of its modest claims, it has already been seized on by the government as an example of how small communities can cut their emissions.

Fifteen months after the idea was proposed, the village now boasts a bewildering array of eco-initiatives, from the humdrum to the ambitious. The cleaners at the local primary school use water warmed by solar power. Refuse recycling rates have replaced village cricket as the jealously fought competitive sport between rival villages. (Ashton Hayes, residents will proudly tell you, is currently riding high at the top of the monthly local authority league.) The usual blizzard of Christmas cards exchanged by neighbours was this year replaced by a communal Christmas tree on which residents hung a single message addressed to everyone. Proposals are under discussion for free wireless broadband to encourage working from home. Pensioners have been swept up in a craze for Remoskas - a kind of mini pressure cooker that uses far less energy than a traditional oven. The more devout eco-friendly villagers have even had a codicil to their wills drawn up leaving a proportion of their estate to offset the impact of their carbon use on the planet. Next year, the village will be one of the first communities to take part in a trial of "personal carbon allowances" run by the UK Energy Research Centre, a publicly funded body that carries out research into sustainable energy. And, most ambitious of all, Ashton Hayes has agreed a deal with Scottish Power to generate its own electricity through a wood-chip "micro-generator" based in the village.

Garry Charnock, the instigator of the project, exudes the village's sunlit charms as we walk into his farmhouse. He's in his early fifties, wears a trimmed auburn beard and favours the kind of counter-culture-veteran-turned-entrepreneur casualwear that Richard Branson has made all his own. "People who move to Ashton very rarely move out," he says softly: "It's almost English society as you imagine it to be. If such a good community can't do it, how the hell do you do it anywhere else?"

At some point in the past 12 months, the British middle classes reached a tipping point in their attitude towards global warming - probably due to a combination of Conservative leader David Cameron's noisy advocacy, the heavyweight coverage given to the government's Stern report and Al Gore's terrifying, Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Figures released in March showed that the reductions in British carbon emissions - largely achieved as a by-product of the closure of heavy industries and coal-fired power stations - have now gone into reverse. They are now at their highest level since Labour came to power. This glacial pace of change has led many communities to eschew mainstream politics and try to save the planet themselves.

The vogue for carbon neutrality - reducing and then offsetting emissions to zero - now looks set to become a feature of British village life to rival the summer fete and the prize marrow competition. More than 30 British communities have followed Ashton Hayes's example by declaring themselves on the route to carbon neutrality. Parish councillors from all over the country gathered two weeks ago in the village for a sold-out conference to share tips about their experiences so far - followed by a performance from the local Morris dancing troupe.

In Charnock's living room - all stripped floors, wood-burner and framed Procol Harum and Cat Stevens albums - he tells me about his inspiration for the project. He is a former hydrologist who became a science journalist before starting his own technical PR firm. During a sabbatical from running his company, he heard UK chief scientist Sir David King speak at the Hay Festival. King said that everybody in the room could make a difference to the problem through their own behaviour and that it could not be left to government alone: "It occurred to me that if all these companies - like HSBC and Toyota - are going carbon neutral, then why can't a village where I've lived for 25 years where we all know each other very well? My wife said you're the kind of person who they might listen to - because they would respect your engineering knowledge and your background."

Charnock set about manipulating the levers of local democracy by giving a presentation to the parish council (the smallest unit of local democracy in Britain, normally occupied with parochial concerns such as playing fields and planning applications). Its members duly voted to support Charnock's idea on the condition that he filled the vacant seat on the council, organised (and fundraised for) a launch to show that the initiative had support in the village, and agreed not to spend a penny of the parish council budget in the process. On a freezing night last January, 400 residents packed into the primary school hall. Over half the adult population of the village had turned out to listen to presentations, eat apple pie baked by the Women's Institute and drink Chapel Down English champagne (chosen because vineyards in Kent will be one of the positive side effects of global warming). "It was amazing," says Charnock. "I can't remember more than 40 people ever coming to a village meeting in the past 25 years."

After the launch event had proved local support for the project, environmental science students from the University of Chester carried out a door-to-door carbon-use survey of about 50 per cent of the households in the village, asking questions ranging from the type of boiler to the number of long-haul flights taken per year. The other half were either not at home (the students didn't work evenings or weekends) or declined to answer the questions. Overall, the survey found - as expected in a wealthy village with limited public transport - that Ashton Hayes's annual carbon footprint of 4,766 tonnes of CO2 was above average - 12 or 13 tonnes of carbon per household compared to a national average of 10 tonnes. According to Charnock: "The worst annual commute to work was 175,000 miles a year. There's a guy who commutes every week to Holland and every three weeks he goes to Abu Dhabi. The joke was that we could reduce our carbon footprint by evicting him."

So how far is the village from the carbon- neutral holy grail? "We're doing a second survey this May with the students to see how much we've saved. My gut feeling is that it will take us five years if we really work hard at it. I'm hoping that we'll get a 5 or 10 per cent reduction this year."

The most important rule of the project, says Charnock, is that there is no finger-pointing about lifestyle choices. It's easy to imagine in a small village that people could end up in pitted camps - Lord of the Flies-style - with "environmentalists" versus all- mod-cons "lifestylers". He says: "We don't get confrontational. You can't go round saying 'buy this car rather than that car'. It's easy to pick on people - but what's the difference between a having a four-wheel-drive and running three patio heaters?"

Charnock is also aware that a finger-wagging approach could lead to accusations of hypocrisy. The survey revealed his own household to have a carbon footprint higher than the village average. To remedy this, he has ordered wool insulation for the loft, replaced his electric water heater with a stove using wood coppiced from the field behind his house, and switched off his spare freezer. He offers me an espresso and we walk into the kitchen. "We used to leave this espresso machine on all day. But if you switch this off, the electricity meter goes round at half the speed. It's difficult to say exactly because the kids have just moved away, but I reckon that in a year, without much effort, we've knocked 10 to 15 per cent off the electricity bill."

Charnock tried to give up flying in the last year - and pushed clients to let him conduct meetings via video-link: "In the last two years I've probably taken three flights. I've made a conscious decision not to fly - which is difficult when you're running an international business. I had to do some interviews for Shell in Kuala Lumpur and Houston. They experimented with that and they were really pleased. It saved them money as well." He has bought a small-engined motor-home for this year's three weeks in Italy, rekindling the spirit of the hippy trail. "It sounds really hicky but it isn't. You meet loads interesting people. I think people in the village are stopping saying 'let's go for lunch in Barcelona.'"

The most painful decision Charnock has made so far was to trade in his 3.5 litre BMW Z4 for a 55-miles-to-the-gallon Toyota. "It was ridiculous. How could I run a carbon neutral project if I had a sports car that looks like a batmobile? I had only had it a short time, and when I first bought it I didn't think about climate change. My teenage sons thought selling it was a bit strange. But people in the village thought it was amusing - and also saw that I was committed."

The carbon neutral venture has only been possible because of the rich middle-class eco-system of scientists, architects, academics and PR professionals living in the village - a mix which Charnock likens to "living on a university campus". An architect has offered his services, free of charge, to design a thermal blanket of straw bales that will insulate draughty old mobile classrooms at the village primary school. Yet another PR company in the village is offering free video-conferencing to residents. Alan Ryder, who runs one of Britain's biggest environmental consultancies, RSK Group, has been providing funding and expertise in mapping the area's biodiversity. "Alan has a company of 300 people which is making loads of acquisitions - he's got no time at all. But he found time to write the minutes of the last meeting," says Charnock. "You wouldn't think he was the owner of one of the biggest environmental companies in Britain. But everybody is concerned about climate change - and a topic that was fringe even 18 months ago is now mainstream. And this gives them permission to be involved."

But this isn't all purely altruism. Many residents are grappling with new niche environmental markets in their own businesses and using Ashton Hayes as a testbed for the booming green economy - predicted by the Department of Trade and Industry to rise from Pounds 25bn in 2005 to Pounds 46bn by 2015. Ian and Lu Strudwick have built a campsite on the outskirts of the village near rare peat bogs and marshes to cater for the growing eco-camper market. Water will be recycled and the roads built out of waste slate materials. The site is yet to open - the Strudwicks are waiting to see how big the market is before committing themselves to installing a rain- harvesting system and solar panels.

En route to the Golden Lion, the local pub, Charnock and I walk past a gabled redbrick Victorian house surrounded in scaffolding. Hugo Deynem, the chair of the parish council, is demolishing old outbuildings to build an eco-extension to his home. He climbs out of an empty window frame and shimmies down the scaffolding. "The most surprising thing for me is that nothing has left the site," he says. "We haven't had one skip that has gone for the landfill." Instead, "exactly like 100 years ago", 25 tons of rubble have been buried onsite. He has used reclaimed bricks and limewater (with minimal carbon released during manufacture) instead of sand and cement. This, though, is no Sunday DIY project. In an almost too neat environmental switch, Deynem has recently closed down his haulage company ("making no money with the ever-increasing cost of diesel") and set up Envirobuild - a carbon-neutral building company. Since all new-build properties will have to be carbon neutral by 2016 he thinks there should eventually be a large demand, but so far inquiries have been confined to the village.

Inside the pub, during a sleepy lunchtime, Barry Cooney, a thickset Mancunian who looks like a landlord from central casting, is enthusing about energy efficiency. Initially, he says he was sceptical about the carbon neutral project. But now, having seen his electricity bill fall by a third, he has become something of an evangelist. "All I've done is simple measures," he says. "I've turned off beer coolers at night - and there's been no problems with the beer. Most pubs keep the cigarette and fruit machine on all night - we've turned them off. We've got rid of the tumble drier that we used to use for the beer towels. It's getting a bug to me now. If I can achieve 10 per cent of licensees to do that, then I've achieved something."

The pub also claims to have Britain's first carbon neutral football team - although, more prosaically, it seems to be more of a lift- sharing arrangement. Instead of using 15 cars to go to the same match, the team hires a minibus. Eco-mania has reached surreal heights in this part of the country, according to Cooney. "Instead of talking about football at the bar we talk about climate change and stuff like that. It's unbelievable," he says. Sensing my doubt, he tells an anecdote: "The other week there were two people talking about stuff. They found out that they both worked in the MBNA bank in Chester. And they both went in to work at half-eight. So they've now decided to share a car."

Over a pub lunch of steak and ale pie, I join six villagers who have formed the inner sanctum of the carbon neutral project. Conversation turns to the signs of climate change in the countryside. Mosquitos and midges are appearing for the first time; lawns need mowing throughout the winter. The folk memory of a much colder Britain, barely a generation ago, is strong. Naomi Deynham, a retired headmistress who has lived in the village for 50 years, remembers a group of villagers having to dig the midwife's car out of snowdrifts 30 years ago. The last deep snow anyone can remember in the village was in the early 1980s.

But even for these committed greens, there are knotty dilemmas to resolve. Is it better to use an electric power shower or to heat a full tank of water? What do you do about a draughty Georgian front door if you live in a conservation area? If the Ocado grocery delivery van is making just one delivery in the village, is it really better than driving to the out-of-town supermarket? And is it worth buying an energy-efficient fridge if it's less easy to repair than old ones - and therefore has a shorter life? "Our project is showing that there are lots of questions like this - and no one yet has answers to them," says Charnock.

"I know," says Tracey Todhunter, a part-time teacher at the school. "We should all be guilt-neutral, really, shouldn't we?"

Everyone around the table seems to have stopped doing things that used to be routine - like driving around the village - and they are all wrestling with drastic cuts in air travel. But can they be bothered to make sacrifices when half the village didn't even fill in the carbon survey?

The latest polling by YouGov showed - whatever the recent shift in opinion on climate change - that 69 per cent of the population still oppose higher petrol duties. Sixty per cent are against David Cameron's proposal for an increase in taxes on cheap flights. It would seem that the new breed of middle-England eco-warriors are still in a minority. "I do sometimes think 'why should I bother when all these people are determined to see football games on the continent and are making no effort whatsoever,'" says Deynham. The path of carbon martyrdom seemed particularly rocky, another villager notes, "when a Liverpool player bought a house nearby and took to driving around the village in his Hummer".

Critics will say that this new middle-class greenery is just a form of puritanism reborn - one that confers a sense of the virtue of abstinence. And, in a post-religious age, there does seem be a rare atmosphere of common endeavour that older villagers have likened to wartime. "I know this sounds strange but there is an almost religious feeling to it," says Charnock. "There is a leap of faith involved. Global warming might not be something you do much about, but you have a moral obligation to do something. And even if we don't save a tonne of C02 the sense of community cohesion has been a wonderful spin-off."

It would be easy to criticise Ashton Hayes as a village full of toy initiatives run by middle-class professionals. Isn't all this lifestyle environmentalism displacement activity when the government target - a 60 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 - needs huge, centralised political change?

Yet it is these kinds of changes in personal habits that the government is pinning its hopes on to reduce the 30 per cent of carbon emissions that come from domestic households. Ashton Hayes was given a Pounds 26,500 (239,000) grant last year by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to encourage other villages to follow its example. "We've given talks to 28 or 30 villages around the country," says Charnock, "but we can't meet the demand. It's getting ridiculous."

And, of course, Ashton Hayes does not have all the answers. "We've got more confused as time has gone on," Charnock admits, in relation to the "carbon sinks" the village has established to absorb its emissions - often planted on pieces of unused farmland by landowners supportive of the project. Here much of the science is shaky: "We've planted 14,000 trees but we're now not sure that they work." How much carbon a tree absorbs depends on its age and on the soil - young trees absorb very little. There have been discussions on introducing wind-turbines to the village but it was concluded that, given the amount of energy they would provide, "it was probably a waste of time".

It seems odd that the tiny population of Ashton Hayes is acting as a Petri dish to distinguish between sensible green measures and counter-productive ones. And, perhaps it's a mark of desperation that the world's media and major cities are treating the village as a green-tinged version of Lourdes. "We've been asked by business contacts in Abu Dhabi and Rotterdam to advise them on going carbon neutral," says Charnock, wide-eyed with disbelief. "It highlights how people are struggling with the whole thing if they ask a village in Cheshire."