In his first column of the term, Ralph Jeffreys explores the loss of community in Britain, arguing it offers radical potential to overcome our societal woes.

Community continues to provide reasons to be hopeful, offering potential solutions to some of our biggest problems, despite having been under attack for years from underfunding due to conservative austerity policies. The cost-of-living crisis and the climate crisis have found some of their most novel and workable solutions in community projects, including community supermarkets selling discounted food and wind turbines which will provide cheaper greener energy to locals. Community, however, can offer not only a huge social benefit, but an important personal one.

The evidence of decline is pretty clear. Pubs, the staple of shared British spaces, closed at a rate of nearly 19 a week between January and June of 2022. Almost a fifth of UK libraries closed in the last decade and since 2008 nearly 35% of music venues have gone too. Many journalists, quite rightly, put the blame on Tories and social media: both are held up as irrefutable facts of our modern era, lamentable and unavoidable. Yet we often find ways to excuse our own inaction, masking what we can be doing to help the community around us.

I think, if we’re honest, ‘community’ can be one of those things that everyone agrees would be nice as long as they don’t have to put in the work to make it happen. I have often found myself failing to volunteer for something with an excuse along the lines of ‘I have something I really have to sort out’. Community work can feel like a kind of benign social sacrifice that we don’t have time to make, or on the occasion we do it, something to be smugly proud of. Yet thinking along the lines of sacrifice is misguiding. Spending time in one’s community is not a personal loss for a social gain, it is a benefit for both.

When I think of all the positive things ‘community’ can offer to us personally, I think of my aunt. She’s coming up to 74 and remains one of the most upbeat people I know. In part this is because she insists on walking everywhere, but it is also because of the energy she puts into communal activities such as joining her local rowing club, and attending a tango class she’s been going to for longer than I’ve been alive. When she moved to a new house in Crouch Hill, she set about fostering a community. She pulled her previously disconnected street into life and now they have a yearly street party, coordinated Christmas lights, and I get to hear hilarious stories about people up and down her road.

What my aunt has quietly been showing me for some time is that engaging in one’s community makes us happier and healthier. Pulling back into our own individualism, on the other hand, has made us lonelier and more anxious. Young people today are the least likely to trust someone they know personally (69%), three times more likely to distrust their neighbours than over 65s and are only half as likely to speak to them in the first place. This rise in mistrust has grown alongside the rise in loneliness and mental health issues among young people. With far fewer shared spaces and opportunities young people are increasingly isolated and removed from their communities. Community, therefore, could be a powerful weapon in combating loneliness and other mental health issues prevalent in youth across the country.

As the psychologist Sanah Ahsan said, “Social action is the medicine that relieves people’s personal and collective stress”. By allowing the individual to locate themselves in a group, it can combat feelings of loneliness and alienation. One of the most powerful ways it does this is to give us the opportunity to interact and work with strangers around us. Such involvement with the different people in a community requires an openness and a tolerance that many people have managed to bypass through selective engagement with the world. In shared spaces we are immersed in the world of the weird, the interesting and sometimes the uncomfortable, which challenges our tendency to build up echo chambers. We get to meet people we’d otherwise never get the opportunity to speak to.

I can think of no better example than a figure from my aunt’s childhood, Sausage Eddie, who my grandfather met at the local men’s institute in the 1960s and developed a friendship with. Shrouded in mystery, this figure was known for disappearing on long journeys abroad and returning, strangely, with the local sausage of whatever country he went to. This may seem trivial, but to me Eddie represents the kind of interactions that cannot be planned, the ones where something unexpected happens. These are the moments that can give us a broader perspective by allowing us to hear a story. Shared spaces allow us to break out of our usual social patterns and meet people like Eddie.

If you would like to get involved in Cambridge or donate here are some organisations you can have a look at:

Cambridge Community Kitchen https://cckitchen.uk/

Cambridge Community Arts https://www.camcommarts.org.uk/

Cambridge Student Community Action http://cambridgesca.org.uk/volunteering-with-sca/term-card/

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