Freecycle

A few weeks ago I was given four beds by three different people - all complete strangers.  They wanted to get rid of them, and I happened to need them - so they gave them to me.  

I've recently been clearing out my loft and had a lot of stuff I've accumulated over the years.  None of it was rubbish, so I wanted to give it away - so I did.  I gave it to people I didn't know who said they wanted it.  There was a cot, a couple of turntables, a slide projector, a negative ionizer, a couple of children's bicycles, some ADSL microfilters - and several other things.

My heating recently broke down.  As I'm replacing the boiler I didn't want to get it fixed, so I asked some complete strangers if they had some electric heaters they could spare.  Two different people came up with six dimplex heaters to tide me over till the new boiler was fitted.

A few years ago, this kind of transaction would have been the stuff of dreams.  Stuff went to the tip if you didn't know someone who wanted it.  You would never go round asking strangers for things you needed.  But the internet has changed all that.  The internet and a rather clever idea called Freecycle.  You can read all about it here, and find your nearest branch.

Freecycle is billed as a way to "keep stuff out of landfill".  I think it is far more than that.  In fact the issue of filling up landfill is a bit over-done and Freecycle probably doesn't even scratch the surface.  What Freecycle is, is a real community.  We hear about "online communities", which often means a group of people who communicate on-line but never meet.  Freecycle goes much further than this.  It's about local people being able to contact each other, know each others' needs and support each other.  That's far more valuable than any environmental ideal or any chatroom you can find anywhere else on the internet.

The Iron Bridge

Many years ago a temporary foot bridge was built over the River Stort in Bishop’s Stortford linking a car park outside a Chinese restaurant with a car park outside the train station. It’s was never much of a bridge, but it served a purpose of allowing pedestrians, many of them hurrying to catch a train, to cross half way between the two available road crossings, thereby saving themselves a walk of about 1000 metres.

A couple of years ago the council got a lottery grant to put something more aesthetically pleasing in place. The project has the rather utilitarian title of “Bishop’s Stortford Goods Yard Bridge”. The main drawback with the old bridge was that it had quite steep steps up each side, so it was out of bounds to mothers with prams and pushchairs. The new bridge design is to have shallow ramps up each side, almost parallel with the river, with steps providing a shortcut for unencumbered, able-bodied pedestrians. Work started a few months ago, and they removed the old bridge and replaced it with an even less inspiring, even more temporary wooden affair, a few metres downstream of the original. Ground work then began to build the foundations for the new structure.

A few weeks ago I walked that way to the station in the morning, and noticed that some of the structure had started to arrive. Then last week I again walked that way for some reason, and was able to witness what may have been the first person to cross the new bridge. All they had in place were the pedestrian steps up one side and down the other, and a section of the main span linking the two. A workman was crossing over to tighten some bolts on the other side. It looked smaller than I was expecting, but it was far from complete. That evening I walked back that way, and the bridge was open – my first chance to cross it.

Since then, the rest of the bridge has continued to go up, and it’s as massive as I was expecting. Have a look at this.