Common Ground (charity)
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Common Ground is a United Kingdom charity and lobby group. It was founded in 1982 by Susan Clifford and Angela King, Common Ground aims to promote local distinctiveness (a phrase which Common Ground coined during the 1980s).
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[edit] Organisation and structure
Common Ground has always been a non-membership organisation (grant and donation-funded) with King and Clifford as co-ordinating directors and a small core staff, usually a team assembled for a specific project. Over the years these have included Darren Giddings, Daniel Keech, Jane Kendall, Beatrice Mayfield, Joanna Morland, John Newton, Kate O'Farrell, Helen Porter, Stephen Turner and Karen Wimhurst. Originally based in London, they have now settled in Shaftesbury, Dorset. There are five honorary directors who provide guidance and assessment, including until his death in 2006 founder member Roger Deakin, author of the book Waterlog, a tribute to 'wild swimming'.
[edit] Work with artists
With roots in environmental and conservation groups such as Friends of the Earth, King and Clifford felt the commonplace was being overlooked at the expense of the special and rare. Common Ground was formed to address that. Throughout its existence, the organisation has introduced social and environmental ideas through a series of notable initiatives, often involving the connection of communities with artists. They have worked extensively with artists Andy Goldsworthy and Peter Randall Page. New Milestones, in the late 1980s, brought sculptors into communities in South West England to make works sympathetic to the different landscapes there. Confluence (1998–2001) saw musicians (including animateur Helen Porter and composer Karen Wimhurst) working with community groups along the entire catchment of a river, the Stour in Southern England. Parish Maps encouraged people to make maps of their own places, signalling what was important to the people who lived there rather than dry cartography.
[edit] Promoting local produce
Local produce has been another driving concern for the organisation, with the apple acting in some ways as a symbol for local foods and their impact on community and landscape: 'The apple you eat is the landscape you create' reads one of their colourful posters. In 1990 they founded Apple Day as a focus for celebration of the hundreds of apple varieties which are ignored in favour of a handful of supermarket-friendly strains. It has since become well established as an annual event, on October 21 each year. Related to this is their campaign for Community Orchards. In 2005 they launched the new project Producing the Goods, exploring distinctive local produce and its marketing.
[edit] Mapping a spirit of place
Their ABC mapping method, for outlining the local distinctiveness of a place, has been widely influential.
[edit] Publications
Other projects have been publication-based, and have included Field Days and Trees, Woods and the Green Man, and they initiated Richard Mabey's Flora Britannica. They have released a number of books, both with national publishers and self-printed, including Holding Your Ground, Second Nature, Apple Games and Customs, In A Nutshell, The Apple Source Book, From Place to PLACE, New Milestones, Leaves (from an exhibition by Andy Goldsworthy) and three poetry anthologies, Trees Be Company, Field Days and The River's Voice. Their latest major work is England in Particular, an encyclopaedic over-view of local distinctiveness that was published by Hodder & Stoughton in May 2006.
