Green Dreams May Come Again: What Next for Frome?

February 2025 — Frome built a radical social infrastucture for a more sustainable town. But multiple, intersecting crises threaten its future. It's time to stop resting on laurels and dream again.

In a recent talk entitled "Social Infrastructure for Green Dreaming at the Periphery: The Case of Frome, Somerset", I explored how Frome’s history of resistance, nonconformism and independence has been significant in realising visions for a sustainable future. Taking part in an online ‘policy huddle’ with the Regional Studies Association Research Network on Peripheries (called EdgeNet), I situated current efforts to create a ‘Green and Healthy Frome’ in relation to the unique local politics in the town. But as we enter a new phase of ecological change and political polarisation, the ‘social infrastructure’ that has emerged out of this history is precarious. Perhaps now is the time for some more ‘green dreaming’.

Radical Frome

Frome has always been a place on the periphery, geographically, culturally and economically. It is a market town, a place of trade at the interface between the rural and the urban. A livestock market was held weekly in the town centre until 1990, when it was moved out to a nearby village. Situated on the edge of the Mendip hills, it is also a place of extraction, with lead mining and limestone quarrying taking place here since Roman times; a chain of major quarries continue to operate nearby today.

The town has long been a place of dissent. The Duke of Monmouth passed through Frome with his burgeoning army of rebels in 1685, drawing on the popular support in the region for his attempt to dethrone James II. John Wesley visited on multiple occasions in the 18th century, and a strong nonconformist religious community was established—rejecting the hierarchies and doctrines of the Church of England, with a greater emphasis on community.

Frome also has a history of economic and political radicalism. A major centre for the textile industry during industrial change, it saw labour uprisings and violent resistance. From the 18th century, riots and unrest over food shortages and the decline of the wool trade proliferated. During the 1830 Swing Riots, local labourers protested wage cuts and mechanisation, while Frome’s weavers resisted industrial change through strikes and machine-breaking. Meanwhile, local organisers pushed for political reform and workers' rights during chartism.

Sustainable Frome

Postwar Frome became a bolt hole for alternative countercultural movements, with activists, artists, and environmentalists taking up residence in the 1970s and 1980s. This community was embroiled in the second wave of environmentalism in the 1990s, responding to growing alarm over climate change and sustainability. From this emerged Sustainable Frome, who would play a significant role in a new era for local politics in the town. Founded in 2006, the group organised transportation to protests, events and acted as an incubator for off-shoot projects around issues such as housing, energy and food.

In parallel, the economic shifts of the 1980s and 1990s saw the decline of industry in Frome, with traditional textile and manufacturing and trades fading. On one hand, the repurposing of empty industrial spaces for creative enterprises, independent businesses, and cultural initiatives was something of a reinvention for the town. Simultaneously, however, economic inequality and the affordability of housing became growing concerns. The influx of new residents, attracted by Frome’s evolving identity, contributed to rising property prices, putting pressure on long-standing communities. These tensions between regeneration and gentrification continue to shape debates over local services, housing and the environment today.

Independence

Against this backdrop, in 2011, members of Sustainable Frome co-founded a political group with the aim of entering candidates for the town council elections. Drawing on discontent with local political representation and developments within the town that were seen as out of step with community needs, Independents for Frome (IFF) took 11 of the 17 seats at the 2011 elections. They went on to win all 17 four years later, effectively banishing party politics from the council. The victory marked the beginning of a radical shift in local governance, prioritising community-led decision-making and environmental initiatives.

This new local agenda coincided with a new national policy direction set by the coalition and Conservative governments under David Cameron and George Osborne. On the one hand, the Localism Act of 2011 aimed to give communities more control over planning decisions. Sustainable Frome had been heavily involved in the development of a 2008 community plan that consulted over 3,000 residents. The group leveraged its links to the town council to transform the 2008 plan into a statutory Neighbourhood Plan. Under the Localism Act, planning authority decisions must consider a Neighbourhood Plan if one is in place. As one of the first towns to adopt such a plan, the community gained greater influence in contesting planning applications at the county level. This increased scrutiny has been significant in respect to a number of proposals, most recently in the success of a campaign to secure a key town centre site, Saxonvale, by a community developer.

Social infrastructure

Simultaneously, government austerity policies have forced local authorities into a decentralised funding model, making many services reliant on competitive grants. However, freed from party doctrine, Frome Town Council have been able to be relatively bold in their own policy making, repeatedly raising council tax revenue and expanding investment in community development and sustainability roles. For example, it became the first local council in the UK to appoint a Resilience Officer to lead environmental and climate projects. Frome’s progressive reputation attracted high-calibre candidates who, aligned with its ethos of community-led initiatives and partnership working, enhanced the council’s success in securing funding. Following 2011, Frome Town Council’s staff has risen from single figures to more than 40, increasing its capacity to initiate and support projects seen as beneficial to the community.

As a result, Frome Town Council was able to champion a range of local initiatives focused on the environment and community development. The council backed projects such as Edventure, a community interest company that fosters enterprise among young people, including a ‘library of things,’ and a Community Fridge. It also helped drive campaigns to protect open spaces, increase affordable housing, and develop renewable energy. The Paris Agreement in 2015 gave further impetus to this agenda, the town being one of the first to declare a climate and ecological emergency in 2018. Subsequently, in partnership with Edventure and Frome Medical Practice, £2 million in grant funding was secured from The National Lottery Climate Action Fund for the Green and Healthy Frome programme.

Overlapping networks

In a recent book, Amy Burnett attributes Frome’s success in shaping development and ‘innovative placemaking’ to the creation of overlapping informal and formal networks between niche community interests and local government decision-makers. However, Peter Macfadyen, a leader of the Independents for Frome movement, suggests this implies more strategy than existed in reality. “There never really was a plan,” he says. Instead, Sustainable Frome’s ethos—carried forward by those elected in 2011 and 2015—stood in stark contrast to previous administrations. Principles of democratic redistribution and ecological regeneration displaced the remote and ideologically constrained governance of the previous Liberal Democrat and Conservative-led councils. Many of the new independent councillors had been extensively involved in community groups and activism within the town, with a direct understanding of challenges and opportunities. As Mcfadyen states, “our approach in government was, ‘we don’t know what to do, we’ve never done this before, so you [the community] tell us.’” But what has since emerged in Frome could be described as the realisation of a kind of political and social infrastructure for a more sustainable town.

Building on this approach, since 2021, the Green and Healthy Frome partnership has supported the development of an even wider network of community groups. Edventure’s Future Shed initiative has been central to this, offering training and residency funding to support grassroots initiatives. Through it’s year-long ‘residency’ model, Future Shed has enabled projects focusing on issues such as local food sustainability, textile repair and reuse, seed sovereignty and nature connection to grow and engage more people in the community. Bringing these groups together, as a network of action that includes the Green and Healthy Frome project partners and other organisations, has further nourished the mycelium of interconnections for knowledge sharing, collaboration and mutual support.

However, with most of the original IFF members having retired from local politics before the most recent elections in 2022, links between the council and community groups on climate and sustainability naturally migrated to the Green and Healthy Frome partnership. As the programme ends in 2026, the shift towards a grant-funded model poses fundamental questions for the legacy of the programme and the future of climate action in the town.

Navigating a precarious future

As it approaches its final year, Green and Healthy Frome is entering into a new academic partnership with the University of Glasgow and a UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)-funded project entitled ‘Civic Imaginary Partnerships’. The research will explore “the lived experience of green dreaming” in Frome and other places around the UK. In other words, the study aims to understand the specific cultural and locational context within which Frome’s visions for a sustainable, resilient, independent future are realised. In particular, the project will explore how this process is enabled and shaped by relationships among grassroots organisations and ‘official’/state institutions.

Developing such a perspective is timely. Today’s politicians are faced with a very different political outlook to 2011. In particular, Covid-19 and war in Eastern Europe have played their part in deepening and intersecting crises: economic, ecological and health. In Frome, a post-pandemic influx of professionals from cities has exacerbated issues of housing affordability. Meanwhile, at least at the local level, the climate debate has moved further in the direction of local adaptation—for, example, to the growing threats of extreme weather. One of the lessons of the Green and Healthy Frome project is the difficulty in evaluating place-based initiatives according to global climate change metrics and the need to build local community resilience. Today, the local government finance crisis and the imminent devolution of Somerset Council assets poses serious questions for the future direction at Frome Town Council. Is there institutional capacity and political will for continued allocation of rising council taxes to support sustainability and community initiatives? With all but one council seats going uncontested to IFF members in 2022, will the rise of right-wing populism—reaching another landmark in the victory of Donald Trump and growing support for the Reform UK party—threaten the local political status quo in 2027?

There has probably never been a more critical moment, then, for Frome to stop resting on its well-won laurels and to consider what green dreams may come again.