Since April 2017, Totnes Community Development Society has been poised to develop out the Atmos Totnes site to a community designed blue print. So what happened?So what happened?

Atmos Totnes is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to break with the time honoured tradition of playing the development game for profit. What you voted for Phase 1 ready to start

We are the Atmos for Totnes campaign group.

‍Trust in developers is at an all time low. But don’t take our word for it. Multinational property development company, the Grosvenor Group, found in 2019 that just 2% of the public trust developers. In the largest ever canvassing of public trust in large scale development, Grosvenor found the biggest driver of developer-distrust is the perception that developers only care about making or saving money.
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Along with 98% of the public, we share the very same concerns that are driving developer-distrust. The 11th hour sale of the Atmos Totnes site to FastGlobe by Saputo is typical of the sort of behaviour that earns developers the dubious title of Least Trusted Business People Ever.

Atmos Totnes is groundbreaking and ambitious. It was never going to be easy. A site of this nature has many issues and challenges and we’d be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge that development on such a scale is complex and involves risk.
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We see the many years TCDS have spent growing an intimate understanding of the site and all its challenges; the thousands of volunteer hours and £800k+ invested in creating a robust plan for the site, the technical and financial knowledge and skills gained en route, all culminating in a solution that was supremely difficult to achieve (and rightly so): securing the Atmos Totnes in the Joint Local Plan through the made Community Right to Build order. No. Mean. Feat.

Coming back to the matter of trust - we consciously place our trust in TCDS. We trust them to procure the most appropriate industry suppliers, backed by ethical finance, to deliver Atmos Totnes according to the plan we, the town’s residents, designed.

What did you vote for?

Arts Centres such that proposed for the Brunel building at Atmos Totnes become places where people can do all sorts of things together: where neighbours can become neighbourly, and where towns can become neighbourhoods.

After 50 years of everyone-for-themselves, culminating in the still-raw divisiveness of the Brexit campaign, we need this re-consolidation throughout the whole of British society. And we need it much more than we need yet another development driven solely by developers' self-interest".

Brian Eno