Green Hustle Festival – the Free Nottingham City Party Uniting Communities on Climate Action – Leftlion

When asked during a recent podcast interview what one action I would take on climate change if I became Prime Minister, I said I would organise a great big festival to bring everyone together. And that’s what we’ve just done in Green Hustle Festival – “why wait for something that’ll never happen?” I said. According to Nottingham Business Improvement District (BID) 10,000 people turned out for our free event celebrating life, nature, community action, and creativity on one sunny, blue-skied weekend in early June 2023.

Looking at the UK Government and its Official Opposition, it can often feel like we’re moving backwards, not forwards, on climate action. The moment the rightwing media gets hold of anything that faintly looks like threatening 20th century status quo fossil fuel interests the parties cave, citing this or that fiscal rule. With official regulators pretty much dismantled, our natural resources have become a Wild West for extractive capitalism. The only hope we really have is… ourselves.

In Nottingham, regarded as a leading global city for climate change, remarkable things have still managed to happen. Data from 2020, released in 2022, shows we’ve reduced carbon emissions by 57% per person since 2005. The council has facilitated the planting of an estimated 37,600 trees since 2019, aiming to hit 50,000 before the year’s out. In all sorts of other places up and down the country too, local people are taking climate action, and addressing social needs, by the horns.

But until recently, it didn’t feel like everyone was really around the table, or aware of the positive things that were quietly occurring. So we felt the need, locally, for a bit of positivity to amplify good work, tell a more optimistic story, and create a space for everyone. Green Hustle Festival was the result. A truly citywide, all-inclusive free event for all ages – with the slight exception of a handful of the film screenings that formed a few of several dozen fringe events.

Our third Green Hustle Festival saw us evolve from our roots as an online event conceived during 2020 lockdowns and filmed on smartphones, followed by a first outdoor outing at the increasingly plant-lined Sneinton Market Avenues in 2021. In turn this was born of the Hockley Hustle’s green efforts – a now 40+ venue annual charity music festival I founded in 2006, which has hosted and helped a proper panoply of the city’s now chart-smashing musical exports.

In moving up to the Old Market Square, we landed in the beating heart of a city which, despite being a favourite target of central Government cuts, has learned to stand on its own two feet and keep society just about hanging on, and progress on the environment steady and determined. Touted as amongst the largest in the UK upon its 2007 revamp, it was initially home to a number of popular and free music festivals including the council-run City Pulse. But these events dropped off following the 2008 Financial Crisis and the subsequent austerity agenda. In recent years few truly public, free, proper festivals have taken place on the site.