At the grassroots
Talking gardening, politics and activism with Dave Amis
Today we are staying local (for me at least) and featuring the projects of a commoner based in Keynsham, between Bristol and Bath. I talked to Dave Amis who runs the community gardening project A plot in the Park, curates a directory of grassroots projects in the Avon region, and writes a blog called At the grassroots. Every few months he prints and distributes a paper with content from the blog.
When I arrive at the café outside Bristol Temple Meads station, Dave is already seated at a table with several issues of his paper laid out in front of him. Some, it turns out, are from his time in Essex. He only moved to Keynsham in 2022, in his mid-60s, to be closer to family.
We both had an interest in meeting up. Dave wanted to learn about The Bristol Commons and explore how we could work together. I had been following Dave’s writing on Substack for a while and been intrigued. Besides his community and gardening projects, he writes on local and national politics in a non-partisan way, looking at how the polarisation resulting from divisive issues might be overcome.
His projects are very much commons-aligned, so I wanted to hear his story. “How far back do you want to go?” he asks.
We end up focusing on the past 20 years. In 2007 and 2008 Dave stood for election for the Independent Working Class Association (IWCA) in Thurrock, Essex. The ICWA arose from the antifascist movement in the 80s and 90s. On a biographical note, Dave was born in Forest Gate, East London, has worked as a graphic artist and “been political since my teens. Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972 was one of the catalysing experiences that made me a lifelong anti-imperialist.”
The ICWA, as he puts it, “imploded” in 2010. Dave was then active in various anarchist factions, but eventually became disillusioned by the movement. There was little tolerance for different opinions, especially when Covid hit. He also finds, “anarchists talk a lot about what is wrong with the world, not enough of them are actively involved in building workable alternatives in the here and now”.
At the time he had already been part of various community garden projects. Gardening got people with very different backgrounds together. “We did not feel a need to talk about politics very much,” he says. “We just turned up and got to work.”
One project was Hardie Park – a neglected and vandalised local green spot, which had already concerned people he’d talked to on the doorstep. A group got together and started with simple activities like litter picking, then creating some beds to put plants in. “It brought communities together at a time when tensions were high. It kept going through lockdown.” Eventually, members set up a café and various local initiatives started. “It went from strength to strength. It‘s something to look back on with pride.” The park is still going strong.
In Keynsham, Dave and his wife Liz run A plot in the park. Coming together at regular sessions, the group plant and distribute fruit and vegetables, and take them to a community fridge that people can take from for free. The group is small, and they would like more people to get involved. But more importantly, they want to see more gardening and community-building intiatives spring up and grow, to form a resilient movement from the ground up. That is why Dave created an impressive directory of initiatives in the Avon region, to point people to places they can join.
Before starting his current blog, At the Grassroots, Dave used to write another one called Stirrings from below which was much more political, including things that some on the left might take issue with, like pointing out challenges with multiculturalism. Dave has taken the blog completely offline now, because it had become too much work to maintain. “It was becoming a liability.”
Sometimes parts of it bubble up on a new incarnation though, called The Avon Stirrer, which he started not long after At the Grassroots. Dave takes pieces from the archive that he deems relevant to the current moment. A case in point is A conversation worth having, which describes how he attended a counter-protest to an already cancelled EDL march in 2010. (“A key skill [...] is to listen”). I wonder if Dave‘s current assessment, that talking across divides has become more difficult these days is true, and whether it could be changing again. It is certainly needed.
During our conversation, Dave observes that Bristol seems quite a segregated city. When he went back to Essex, which he says is supposed to be racist, he was “struck how diverse it is.” One environment where Dave sees people from different classes, skin colour and religions coming together is certain protest movements, for example the protest against the implementation of so-called “Liveable neighbourhoods”.
While Dave criticises institutions like the council, he does not want to be confrontational anymore. His key priority is building new systems in the “increasingly dystopian” old shell. Tidying and planting on unused land “creates better places to live, and gives people a purpose and a skillset, and self-confidence and pride”.
When we talked, Dave was working on a new paper – now published – to print and distribute at festivals and other events. Besides encouraging people to do gardening and pointing them to the directory to find help and communities to join, the paper calls for unity and solidarity, “United we will thrive, divided we will fall”. Dave would like to go into more disadvantaged areas and distribute the paper there – to “get it into the heads of people who need to read it” as he puts it. That’s not so easy for Dave, who doesn’t drive, which is one reason he’s keen to get more people involved.
If you run a project in Bristol, Bath or surrounding areas that could be added to the directory, or if you are in Keynsham and would like to get involved with A plot in the park, get in touch with Dave.
Or just check the directory, if you want to get involved with any projects in the surroundings. With the coldest and darkest days of the year behind us, it will be a good time to get out to that plot.