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The consequences of austerity – the widening wealth inequality and environmental degradation brought on by capitalism – leave a trail of destruction in the form of abandoned buildings, railways, harbours and landscapes. Yet amongst the wreckage, something stirs. A type of love often forgotten by our species, which stimulates the growth of roots in communities, helping us expand, entangled and generous like mycelium; the antithesis of the lonely linear towers of hierarchy in which we currently fight to survive.
This type of love leaves a trail made up of touching stories of resilience and regeneration that Hazel Sheffield, a business reporter and investigative journalist, has spent years researching. Within the pages of Frontierlands are living examples of the future in action. Sheffield highlights real communities who have used their first-hand experiences of assets and industry being stripped away to reshape their reality in ways that could seed a revolution – one in which we not only survive, but thrive.
The many inspiring groups and projects Sheffield describes include Hastings Commons, who are redeveloping derelict buildings through community ownership; Retrofit Balsall Heath in Birmingham, who have led a people-powered project to solve fuel poverty and bring the community together by retrofitting homes; the regeneration of Somerset’s Watchet Harbour, where the Onion Collective have brought art and new life to the isolated quayside; and a Welsh community who are managing a sustainable forestry programme in partnership with government-sponsored Natural Resources Wales as part of their collective, Welcome To Our Woods.
The book sings an anthem of the incredibly strenuous labour that communities around Britain have undertaken to birth a new reality for themselves and for future generations, bringing transformations that challenge government policies and the cultural status quo through collaboration, perseverance and creativity.
Through beautiful observation, Sheffield shares the honest story of the long game of true stewardship: of the everyday people arduously yet joyously uncovering solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems and setting new precedents in how things are done. “They are neighbours growing food while also experimenting with democratic ownership structures,” she explains. “They are communities working for racial justice, while also retrofitting a factory.”
Sheffield also highlights communities exploring alternative economic models that “draw on the idea of gift-giving and relationship-building rather than pure exchange. They are cooperatives, community land trusts, tool libraries, community energy projects, urban farms, and artists who see art as a practice of imagining rather than as a profit-making commodity.”
These are genuinely difficult transformations that take months, years and sometimes decades to achieve. Each is shaped in ways that protect those alive today and many generations to come. Together they tangibly shift our collective reality to address the challenges of climate breakdown, while also addressing its entanglements with social inequality, and the lack of both communal connection to the Earth and land, and interpersonal connections.
It is something evergreen and expansive that Sheffield has gathered for this book: a new foundation, where we are reconnected to our environments and harnessed to each other in the shared belief that another world is possible. Not just in name, but in the countless actions of people who see the glimmer of possibility to transform, and do so with the strength only a community can bring.
Often our ideas and actions fail to meet in harmonious ways. Yet Frontierlands ties them together, joining the spiritual and practical with tangible action, where mistakes from the past are healed by hopes for the future.
Frontierlands: Britain’s Survival in the Making by Hazel Sheffield. Torva, 2026. ISBN: 9781911709312
