LFG has expanded across the country in the two years since it was founded. Each local LFG chapter has a captain and a team of volunteers acting to end decline in their local areas.
Here’s what they’re doing right now.
Cambridge
Due to his earlier commitment to a house party – hero – Tom kicked us off with an overview of the EWR campaign that he is helping to coordinate between Cambridge, Oxford and Milton Keynes. The Transport Group, James Gleave of Milton Keynes in particular, has helped enormously and the campaign now has plans in place for launch videos, opinion pieces, and have even managed to get an MP on board.
Cambridge are also building a campaign on the Greenways, a network of paths that was promised and never built.
Croydon
Our new Croydon Chapter got started last weekend by taking part in the National Day of Action. Charlie has been litter picking in Croydon for a long time, and now Ricardo and the rest of the Chapter are set to super charge his efforts to fix Croydon one weekend clean at a time.
Leeds
Leeds are ploughing ahead with their campaign for the tram, building a 3 month plan on the back of all the work they have done so far this year. Their videos comparing the successfully completed London Underground Jubilee line to its lost twin – the Leeds tram – are amongst our best performing advocacy videos on the platform! Serious planning starts at the social on 27th October, come along if you are near!
Manchester
Manchester recently ran an incredibly successful Hackathon, led by Roman, Akash and Charlie. The Hackathon produced 8 teams and some very cool prototypes. As usual, there were some submissions that stretched the themes slightly... but the final products were impressive nonetheless. Getting back into the usual cadence of socials now, their next project could well be the tram line extension, something Dan has already worked on a lot (see his excellent videos on our Instagram). The PMs home city has a budget of £2.5 billion to build it, so really it shouldn’t be that much to ask...
Akash also recently took part in the Downing Street Hackathon. Check out this great photograph
Milton Keynes
Matthew has been busy recently driving recruitment for the Milton Keynes Chapter through Facebook posts. He has also been very involved in pushing for policies that will facilitate the use of dockless bikes and scooters in Milton Keynes in the face of organised opposition who would rather see them banned!
Newcastle
The Newcastle Chapter is still very young, but it’s great to see them hit the ground running with ideas for metro expansion and more ambitious plans for new railway stations. Millie filled us in on the joint event she is hosting between the Chapter and the Newcastle University Conservative and Reform Society; something she is working on making a completely cross-party and pro-growth event with other societies from NU and Durham.
Reading
Reading has been focusing on building a campaign to push for the Western Heathrow Approach which would serve huge chunks of the SW including South Wales who currently have to journey into London and back out to get to the Airport. It seems the main blocker is money as the whole project was approved pre-COVID and then fell by the wayside. Next steps for Alfie and Tom are to make contact with MPs who have already openly stated their support and also to the Thames Valley Centre for Commerce who have done some work on this in the past.
Sheffield
Sheffield had a great social yesterday. We discussed the direction of the chapter, including what they can do to support TransPennine Connect with their proposals to build the Manchester<>Sheffield tunnel.
Soho
Soho have had a quiet few weeks since Westminster Council voted in their depressing licensing policy without making any changes. Interestingly, when the Council got answers to their consultation that they didn't like (I think it's a safe bet they were our answers) they accused them of not understanding... Oh well, we aren't finished yet, this campaign made it to the Wall Street Journal, we aren't about to give up now! Next year, we'll push the Council to review the policy again, like they promised they would.
Swindon
Swindon are still building relationships with local authorities to save the Mechanics Institute, and in the meantime they have taken on responsibility for ensuring a set of public football pitches near the station are being kept free of litter. Like some other Chapters, they have noticed that the volume of litter is decreasing over time, showing that if you look after something, other people will follow that lead! They were out in force at the National Day of Action.
West London
Our Hammersmith & Fulham, Putney, and Ealing chapters have joined forces to tackle the disjointed (or non-existent) London policy for dockless bikes. They are building a policy covering parking, theft machnisms, fines, and infrastructure to try and create a model that can be copied across the country.
West Midlands
The West Mids boys – Isaac, Jon, Ed, Will and Reuben – have been very busy this year with a Hackathon that produced some very promising prototypes. They have been developing several projects that came from the Hackathon, while keeping up a regular cadence of pub trips. The newest event is their Birmingham Tech Week Fringe Event. This is no small feat! Tech weeks across the world showcase each city’s best efforts on the frontier of technology, to be awarded an official fringe event ranked among the city’s best is incredible work. The HQ team will be there to celebrate the achievement and support the chapter so I hope we might see some other familiar faces there on the 20th October.
Westminster
Harvey debriefed a successful event in Soho held in partnership with Buffering Britain aiming to create a fun way to measure just how bad London’s phone signal is, feeding data into BB’s national campaign. Attendance at the event was great and a few more members for the Chapter were recruited! Now Westminster are focusing on their next social: The Budget Special, and then looking to finalise details for their next event (watch this space for something cool).
The partnership with Buffering Britain is ongoing and those guys have some more cool ideas that we can perhaps translate to other areas of the country so if you are plagued by bad phone signal, then perhaps we’ve got a project we can run. Download their app on IOS and see what you think.
And finally…
Edinburgh
Over the last couple of months, the Edinburgh Chapter has been running a campaign to prevent the Northern Extension of the Ediburgh Tram from being cancelled completely. The official wording is ‘deprioritised’, but we aren’t stupid. The Chapter built a brilliant campaign that exposed the efforts of a small group of wealthy residents who were pressuring the Council to cancel the Northern extension. The extension would connect one of Edinburgh’s most deprived neighbourhoods to the city centre, and travel along an old railway line that used to carry trains & had been temporarily converted to a path. They had the audacity to call it a ‘linear park’ with a straight face.
So this month’s Chapter Hero is Calum McCutcheon who built the campaign, recorded the campaign video, delivered a deputation to the transport committee and answered all their questions. His efforts, along with the Chapter’s social media activity, saw hundreds of emails sent to Councillors demanding they just build that tram. In the end, they managed to shift the position of the SNP from voting against the tram completely, to leaving the possibility open for the future.
This was an incredible achievement for a brand new chapter in just a few short weeks. They now have the opportunity to collaborate with much more media in Edinburgh, and the MP for the area has come out in vocal support of their campaign.
Let’s keep going
We have to value our neighbours, neighbourhoods and nation enough to try to fix it, and we have to believe that we can. This decline is not inevitable, and the Government and its associated bodies don't happen to us, they work for us. We are reminding them of that fact.