Atmos Totnes

For the past few weeks there have been over 700 visitors to the Atmos Totnes Hub to share their memories, your visions, your ideas and your passion around the former Dairy Crest site. The walls are full of your ideas and sketches….

We have two weekends of this phase of the consultation remaining. So if you haven’t yet been down, we are open Fridays (10 - 7pm) and Saturdays (11 - 4pm) until December 6th. You are very warmly invited.

You can hear directly from visitors last weekend in this podcast and how people appreciate being listened to through this very engaging and creative consultation process.

We are starting to pull together everyone’s input so far and these insights will shape the next stages of the development at Atmos Totnes. For example when asked “if you visited in 2020 and it had turned out in the ideal way for you, what would you see there?”, the most common responses so far have been:

• Open spaces, green space, nature & wildlife
• Manufacture, craft/workspace, skills share, enterprise & learning
• Contemporary, sustainable design and natural materials

When asked what you might be doing, the leading responses so far have been:

• Working, teaching, learning, workshops, crafts, making, creating, sharing skills
• Playing
• Eating, shopping, socialising, dancing

The next stage is the process of starting to give form to your ideas. This Friday between 5 and 7pm and Saturday between 11 and 1pm, the architects will be at the Hub, starting to outline the spaces on the site and how these are integrated. Your feedback will be much appreciated.

We also continue to be touched by the richness of the stories people are bringing in about their time working at the former Daws/Cow&Gate/Unigate/Dairy Crest site, such as Bob Alford and Martin Evans. If you worked there, or know anyone who did, you are very welcome to come down.

Atmos Totnes and the consultation was in the Herald Express last week. You can keep in touch with Encounters leading the consultation at Atmos Totnes through Facebook and Twitter. We are deeply grateful to everyone who has inputted and supported this phase, so far.

This project is being led by Ruth Ben-Tovim with associates Ruth Cross, Megan Beck and James Engwell. Volunteers from the community are also involved in supporting individuals and groups to come in and use the space and workshop sessions and to lead outreach activities within the community. The engagement and consultation is being led on behalf of the Totnes Community Development Society, for Atmos Totnes working with LED architects and developer McCarthy and Stone.