Environment update from local campaign group 2G3S

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Repair cafe

Great Shelford Free Church 2pm - 5pm - 7th February 2026

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Bring along your broken item and a skilled volunteer will help you fix it!  We can tackle a wide variety of repairs including electrical and electronic devices, as well as clothes and fabrics.

Please do book in your item for repair – this helps us plan our schedule so we can avoid people having to wait, and also means we can do our homework in advance to assess the repair.  The link to the booking form can be found on the event page on the CCF website here, and also on the 2G3S website.

Bookings will open on 13th December, and will close on the Monday before the event (2nd Feb) or earlier if we reach full capacity. 

Please note that we will not be able to replace cracked screens on phones or tablets. The repairers are brilliant and can fix a lot of things but there are no guarantees.

We will collect portable non-working (unfixable) electrical items and ensure these are properly disposed of.

We are always busiest when the cafe opens at 2pm – best to aim to arrive on time for your booked slot if you have one, or anytime between 2:15 and 4:15 if you don’t have a booking.

You can read more about what happens at a repair cafe in our blog post.

Posted Dec 1 2025

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Dr Bike continues to hold its volunteer-run weekly bike repair sessions at the Old Slaughterhouse in Stapleford, 3pm to 5.30pm every Tuesday. Children are welcome to come and learn how to look after their bikes and do simple maintenance and repairs, but please attend with them (for safeguarding reasons). For more information, contact drbikestapleford@gmail.com. You can also book a time slot at that address, though this is not essential. The Saturday sessions may resume in Spring. 

Planning Meeting – our next planning meeting is on Monday 5 January at the community room in Cox’s Close, Stapleford, where we will be arranging our upcoming events. Do come along and meet us, and suggest activities you might like us to do.

The Future of Water – we are organising a conversation evening about water, a very important issue around here. We will have speakers from Cambridge Water and Cam Valley Forum (or another water quality organisation), and our councillor Peter Fane will talk about planning issues. It will be on Thursday 22 January at 8pm at Cox’s Close Community Room in Stapleford. Check our website or Facebook page nearer the time to confirm details. 

Good News evening – we held this event at the end of November, and people came along with items of good news and shared them over refreshments. We all felt a little more cheerful about the state of the environment and had hope for the world by the end of the evening. We heard about groups of people getting together to change things, such that more traction is building to bring about change at government level. At international level we considered how although COP30 didn’t achieve much in relation to phasing out fossil fuels, there was progress for indigenous groups’ voices to be heard. Jonathan Porritt, a well-known green campaigner for many years, has written that solar and other renewables will promote energy security, democracy, fairness, and reducing climate change, referring us to evidence that this will be so. The magazine ‘Positive News’ discusses lots of issues such as these and can be seen at Cara Café in Great Shelford (care of one of our members). We heard about an artist with Cambridge Carbon Footprint, Hilary Cox Condron, who has designed the mural on a bridge along the Chisholm Trail. She has also worked with local schools to express through art their lives, what they love about where they live and about nature, and their dreams for the future, including making pledges to improve their local environment in some way. What the primary school children said in her video was very impressive, so articulate and informed. Another member reported on how a group of villagers in Fowlmere have collated the times of the various different buses that call in the village to make one simple timetable, which they posted through every letterbox and displayed at the bus stops. Bus usage has increased since this has been done, thus helping to ensure the bus services continue to be run in the future. And locally, we heard from the Stapleford Tree Project, which has planted well over 100 trees around the village, mostly on public land such as verges or street corners, and at the primary school with the help of children, and are continuing to plant this season. Stapleford St Andrew’s church has a link with a church of the same name in Nachingwea, Tanzania, and for many years they have raised money to support projects to help life in the African village and its surroundings improve, from donating bicycles, sewing machines, school libraries, educating girls, and a number of other projects that have been identified by people in the two villages communicating and visiting. Most recently they have facilitated the setting up of a women’s group to meet regularly and make sanitary towels that can be washed out and reused. Girls used to miss school because they didn’t have adequate protection, and it’s a big societal step that the women can meet regularly and talk about periods, contraception, and other problems that were considered taboo. 

It was heartening to talk to people who have got up and done something to help make the world a fairer, greener, kinder place to be. Perhaps, thinking about new year resolutions, we could all be kinder to each other and our surroundings, consume less, and spend our money wisely.
Greater Cambridge Local Plan - Cambridge City Council and SCDC have released a draft of the new local plan for ‘Greater Cambridge’ for the next 20 years.  This includes, in our part of South Cambs, small housing developments, a new settlement of 6,000 houses near Little Abington, expansion of the Cambridge Biomedical Campus into the Cambridge Green Belt and plans for large logistics warehouses adjacent to the A14 and A11.  There is obviously a risk that these further conversions of countryside and farmland into built environment will increase pressure on water resources and cause a loss of habitat for wildlife. More information can be found at Greater Cambridge Shared Planning. A public consultation on the draft plan runs until 30 January, so do voice your concerns if you have them.   
If you are interested in green matters and the environment at all levels (individual, local, national, international), send an email to mail2G3S@gmail.com to sign up for our monthly newsletter, or to get more information about our meetings. We are a friendly group and welcome anyone who wants to come along to one of our events or to find out more about how we can live sustainably. Also see our Facebook page and our website 2g3s.staplefordvillage.org.uk/.     Helen Hale

Posted Dec 12 2025