Frontierlands

A compelling account of how derelict neighbourhoods and abandoned buildings have become a new frontier for community development, seedbeds of renewal, creativity, and social justice ... Read one page, and you will want to keep reading. In the end, you may want to grab a work belt or spade and create a “lifescape”, a renewed commons that is the basis of a flourishing social life.

Paul Hawken, author of Regeneration

Wrapped within the beauty of this book is a clarion call for a deeper understanding of our most precious spaces and the people within them. Remarkable, exquisitely researched and acutely observed, it won’t leave me.

Lucy Easthope, author of When the Dust Settles

This is not just a grassroots manual for 21st century survival – groundswelling and prophetic, it could be a startling blueprint for life in the 22nd.

Tom Nancollas, author of Seashaken Houses

We've all heard a lot about broken Britain; Sheffield's informative, lyrical and uplifting narrative centres around those busily engaged in mending it. An all-to-often overlooked kind of kintsugi. This is a book for now, when so many feel jaded, worn thin and in desperate need of hope.

Kassia St Clair, author of The Secret Lives of Colour

A lyrical and vivid portrayal of communities struggling to build ecologies of care, solidarity, and responsibility against interlaced histories of exploitation and exclusion. Compelling and deeply life-affirming.

Davina Cooper, author of Everyday Utopias

This is the right book, at the right time…I defy you to feel hopeless or depressed about the world after reading this book. It's a battle cry, a playbook – and, above all, a warm and beautifully drawn portrait of determined, inspired humans – many of them women – creating positive and lasting change.

Isabel Berwick, author of The Future-Proof Career

Hazel Sheffield's book is a warming remedy to the creeping nihilism many feel about the places where they live, and their power to have a hand in changing them. The resourceful communities, partnerships and collectives she encounters in Frontierlands are frequently only just getting started in building something and setting down roots, and their attempts and battles, laid out here with deep feeling, have the potential to get many more people to start claiming space - maybe even an entire generation or two.

Jen Calleja, author of Vehicle: a verse novel.

Frontierlands is a handbook of hope and regeneration. We learn about the old ways that are being unearthed and reimagined for a very different future. We meet people who are rebuilding not only homes, neighbourhoods and organisations, but also relationships, ideas, and sprits. It is a book about collective vision and stewardship, born for such fractured times as these, and Hazel Sheffield — with her deep and wide knowledge of the alternatives to the status quo that are being built at the edges — is the perfect guide.

Elizabeth Wainwright, author and community worker