ACFM Microdose: How Britain’s Coastal Communities are Reclaiming Power w/ Hazel Sheffield

**Nadia Idle** (0:02)
This is Acid Man.
Hello, and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Nadia Idle, and today we have a very special microdose interview with Hazel Sheffield. Hazel Sheffield is a business reporter and investigative journalist. Her work can be found in national and international publications, including The Guardian, The Economist, Follow the Money, and Financial Times. Before going freelance, she covered derivatives for Euro Money and worked as the business editor of The Independent. She left The Independent in the summer of 2016 to start a grant-funded project called farnearer.org, documenting self-organizing communities and economic alternatives in the UK.
After a decade of reporting, that work has come together as Frontierlands, her first book. She lives with her family here in Hastings. Welcome, Hazel, to ACFM. It's so good to have you.

**Hazel Sheffield** (1:16)
It's so good to have you here in Hastings.

**Nadia Idle** (1:18)
Yes, I am very excited, listeners, that we are actually recording this podcast in a beach hut on the beach, which means you'll hopefully get a few little atmospheric sounds.
But this is an important setting for us because this microdose is following our full episode on the beach. If you've not listened to that yet, please go ahead and listen to that. We will be talking today with Hazel about her book, Frontierlands, and specifically about the coastal communities, which she covers in the book. So it's a brilliant book. If you haven't checked it out, please go and buy a copy. I did a launch with Hazel in London back in March, which is a very enjoyable event at Housemans in London. But here we're going to be focusing more on the coastal aspects of the book. So maybe let's start Hazel by you telling us a little bit about how we arrived at writing this book.

**Hazel Sheffield** (2:11)
Thanks so much, Nadia.
Well, as you've already said in your lovely introduction, I was the business editor of The Independent and it was 2016 on the eve of the Brexit referendum.
When I was covering the markets, was cycling across town the morning of the announcement to see what happened and obviously the vote came to leave, which was a shock to everyone in the newsroom, everybody in London, essentially, you know, the markets didn't predict it, the newspapers didn't predict it, the polls didn't predict it. It was only really the very last minute we realized that the rest of the country had revolted. And I think I just had this lightbulb moment, and I was like, what is going on out there? And we're missing that story in the center. So I wanted to get out of the capital basically and start reporting from communities that were further away from the center of power. And I won some money, a grant, and started traveling in search of what I called alternative economies. That was the sell for my funder, but I really had no idea what that meant at the time. And actually what happened over the next 10 years is I met countless people in many different places over the country who were experimenting with different ways to revive and renew the failing social contract in places that had been completely overlooked. And after 10 years, 10 of those stories have now become this book, Frontierlands.

**Nadia Idle** (3:40)
And the full title is Frontierlands, Britain's Survival in the Making, which I think is a really provocative title. And it was one of the reasons where I thought, I think this book is going to tell us something different or kind of say a new story.
And I suppose one of the things that I'm interested in and maybe we can start there is, is this book or this work or this piece seems to be a front runner in developing a sort of canon about what processes, communities, people, institutions are actually managing to live, survive and thrive despite capitalism. So there seems to be a new, I think, discourse or story there. And does that resonate as a kind of meta-framing, I suppose, for this work for Frontierlands?

**Hazel Sheffield** (4:31)
Absolutely. And I've really noticed that this summer, the Overton window has kind of shifted.
And I think, you know, when I listened to your ACFM about the beach, you were talking about, this is the first heat wave, hopefully it's going to be over, that was a couple of months ago that you recorded that. And we're still in these successive heat waves now, mid-August, the heat has continued. Suddenly people are kind of waking up to this idea that it's not really about prevention anymore, it's about adaptation. And that shift in the discourse has opened up a window on a whole load of literature, a body of literature that I think is evolving in that space. So there's a whole reading list in the back of the book. But I was very influenced and read a lot around people who are theorizing these post-capitalist futures, obviously Mark Fisher, JK. Gibson Graham, Ruth Gilmore, Donna Haraway, Silvia Federici, Eleanor Ostrom. But there's also an emerging body of literature of people who are literally reporting on how communities survive in disaster. So Rebecca Solnit has an incredible book about this called A Paradise Built in Hell. There's an amazing woman called Lucy Easthope, who is literally a disaster preparedness expert. She advises the government when there's a train crash or a flood on what to do next. And she's written an amazing book documenting what happens to communities in those moments. And then there's a few different books that talk about how practically change crystallizes in communities. There's one book by Gal Beckerman called The Quiet Before, in which he argues that radical ideas are incubated in small, even obscure communities before they can change the world.