In 1990, Green Party members Peter Lang, Val Oldaker and Jim Wallis were looking for an ethical venue to celebrate the party’s 18th anniversary. Having failed to find anywhere that even thought about its environmental impact, they abandoned the search and opted instead for a DIY approach, renting a field, marquees and cooking facilities and building a summer camp which, today, is Green & Away: Europe’s only tented conference centre.
Since then, organisations that have held their summer conferences at Green & Away include the Soil Association, New Economics Foundation (nef), the National Trust, Friends of the Earth, Sustrans and, of course, Resurgence, which has been holding its popular summer camps there for 14 years.
The underlying principle of Green & Away is to ‘leave no mark’ – when the camp is cleared away at the end of the 10 summer weeks, the field has a few yellow and bare patches where the structures have been, but the grasses recover in a few weeks and there is little evidence of what has taken place.
Green & Away is located on a magical 200-acre Care Farm on the banks of the river Teme in Worcestershire, where there is an organic café, artists’ studios, a plant nursery and beautiful river walks, and it even has a bus stop right outside, making it accessible by public transport.
For more information Green and Away www.greenandaway.org
The Resurgence Summer Camp and online bookings www.resurgence.org/summercamp
