People For Bikes shares J&O’s slow life philosophy: that life is far more enjoyable when experienced on two wheels. What’s not to love about that? Get pledging and pass it on to your friends (especially if you’re based in the U.S.!)

H2, a private members’ fitness club, will cater to the increased number of cyclists in London, thanks to the Barclays bike rental scheme.

If you live in the London area and you’ve previously put off cycling because of the lack of facilities to freshen up at your work, this centre could be a great solution. There’s a huge 240-space bike parking area, sports massages on tap and even dry cleaning and laundry services.

Best of all, there’s a cycle service centre, so if you get a flat tire on the way to work, you can drop it in to be fixed for the commute home.

Classes for Cyclists

Unsurprisingly, the gym offers classes tailored for cyclists. Serious cyclists can give spinning a bash if they like.

In fact, the gym has been so popular, with over 400 members in six weeks, that a second club is due to open in London Wall in mid 2012. Plans are also in the works for a third club in the Holborn area.

Affordable fitness

At £30.99 for peak time access, and £21.99 for off peak, it’s actually quite affordable for a London-based gym. I quite like that there’s a pay as you go option, if you’re not a regular commuter.

H2 Fitness Club

But they’re not all entirely ethical. Or eco-friendly. There are however a few group-buying sites popping up that take a new spin on the popular business model.

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Slow group-purchasing sites

Zipongo

Zipongo is a Bay Water, USA-based site that promotes deals for healthy foods (rather than the glutton of cupcake offers a certain group-buying site prefers). It’s all about natural foods, like cereals and coconut water. It’s not entirely a surprise to see a scheme like this succeed in San Francisco, a place known for its healthy habits, but it would be great to see it branch out.

Blissmo

Blissmo offers discounts on organic and eco-friendly products, ranging from independent jewellery designs to toxin-free nail products. It’s a great way to support growing businesses while feeling guilt-free about your purchases.

EthicalDeal

EthicalDeal helps you discover green things to do in your area. Deals include organic hair cuts, eco-friendly spa stays, discounted yoga clothing and tickets to Make It! Vancouver.

Do you know of any alternative group-buying sites? Let us know in the comments!

Image source: newsusacontent

Well, thanks to “Morph My Food”, you may soon be able to locate the perfect recipe to tackle your mini food mountain.

The iPhone app is the brainchild of a group of students over at Imperial College in London. It’s all part of”Thought For Food”, a competition to find the best ideas to help tackle food waste.

Ten universities around Europe are taking part in the challenge, finding out about global food issues and coming up with some solutions — as well as spreading the word via social media.

The winning teams will be on stage at the ‘One Young World’ in Zurich: “the premier global forum for young people of leadership calibre”.

Here’s a video explaining how Morph my Food iPhone app works

And you can check out all the other amazing competition entries over on the Thought For Food YouTube channel.

For even more information, take a look at the brilliant Thought for Food Challenge website or watch this inspiring call to arms video to get yourself all pumped up.

Good luck to all the entrants!

For most families, gone are the days of living around the corner from your nan, sitting around the dinner table and waxing lyrical, and looking through ancient photo albums that seem to have existed before colour was invented. Now, we use Skype to chat to our relatives from across the ocean, eat on the go and have digital cameras that delete photos as fast as they take them.

Founder of the site Helen Spencer was saddened that she had only inexplicable photographs from her mother’s youth to remember her by, which would have been all the richer in sentimentality had she had the stories to back them up. And so, SaveEveryStep was born; designed to preserve memories and create an online timeline of your life’s ups and downs so that your special moments don’t leave the world with you.

As the site cheekily states, they can ‘literally save your life’. From that painting you did on your first day of school  to that boyfriend you probably wouldn’t mind forgetting, little slices of life that you think are mundane may just make your children, grandchildren or great grandchildren smile one day, happy at knowing just a little more about you.

In a day and age where we’re on the move and don’t have space for hundreds of albums and scrapbooks, SaveEveryStep allows us to savour every key event in life without causing yet more clutter. You can even get to work on a few timelines at once, with a free membership including 100MB of storage space that’ll easily hold all of your snaps from the baby years to wedding days.

A refreshing and touching idea, I love the thought of my future grandkids sitting around a computer (or whatever it is they’ll be using in those days) and reading up on how I lived my life and where it led me.

More importantly, my parents are no longer spring chickens – though don’t tell them I said that – and now that I’m older I’m keen to learn as much about their lives as I can, from the photo I recently found of my mum looking like Madonna to the tales of my dad’s extensive travelling and studying.

As Helen says, life is a journey, and while you never really know how long it might be, it’s guaranteed to go too fast (we still can’t believe it’s June already). SaveEveryStep gives us all the chance to make our mark and provide future generations with an insight into where they came from. We’re not immortal, but our stories can be…

What do you wish you could know about an older relative?  Let us know in the comments!

[Image: SheaAK]

If you’re not already an addict — or someone who suffers everyone else’s daily newfeed farm updates — the game puts users into farmers’ wellies letting them create their own ‘farms’, choosing everything from livestock to crops.

So when the National Trust announced its MyFarm scheme, it’s probably no surprise that applications for virtual ‘farmers’ came flooding in.

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National Trust MyFarm

MyFarm goes live on 26 May at Wimpole Home Farm. The 1,200-acre site — one of three National Trust farm — is near Royston in Cambridgeshire. It’s home to a range of livestock including cattle and sheep, goats, horses, poultry, and now 10,000 farmers! Wimpole Farm is currently self-sustained and is expected to blossom further with funding coming in from MyFarm subscriptions.

Subscribers pay a £30 annual fee to become one of the 10,000, giving it a slightly more exclusive feel than Farmville.

“No experience necessary” is written across the site’s homepage with everyone from students to agricultural experts welcome, although I imagine the latter is more encouraged.

Users will be given decisions to make each month based around three areas: crops, livestock and environmental impact. There are already some worries growing as to the welfare of the land and animals and this will be monitored and taken into account when users are given their monthly tasks.

The application of these tasks can be monitored by users online through webcams, video diaries and blogs in place at Wimpole. This sense of bringing agriculture to people’s doorstep serves to make people more aware of food they are eating, from its production to eager consumption.

Encouraging people to understand what’s on their plate and all the behind-the-scenes work that goes into making their Sunday roast is a great idea. This re-connection with real food for real people in the UK is a great step towards personalising your dining experience.

The National Trust has got a foot in the barn-door for Slow Foods!

Sources:

MyFarm [Homepage]

Way too many people play Farmville [Gamesradar]

How MyFarm works [Telegraph]

National Trust’s Wimpole Home Farm seeks online farmers [BBC]

Designed to promote the slow life movement, this not-for-profit group formed in 1999. Their whole ethos focuses around the motto “become the sloth”, with a gentle drive towards a local living economy as well as conservation, ethical consumerism, sustainable living and fair trade.

The group organises workshops, invite in speakers, and hold special events such as voluntary blackouts and slow travel tours.

The Sloth Club is also pre-occupied with slow business, creating a “Slow Business School“, and their very own currency system.

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Cafe Slow

As if all that wasn’t brilliant enough, the Sloth Club even has its own restaurant,  Cafe Slow, serving — you guessed it — organic food and selling all manner of ethical produce and literature (much of which you can find online at their Sloth Club shop). The cafe also acts as a community centre for local events.

This is just a sample of some of the many marvellous things the club does. The wonderful Deborah Merriam over on Sustainable Slow Stylish has done an extensive round up of the clubs best bits. Check out her piece for even more detail — and have a look at Slow Japan for more news on the Sloth Clubs latest languid adventures in Slow.

Thanks to Deborah Merriam for the inspiration on this piece!

The thing is, the concept of getting to know your neighbours is one that’s been on the decline for a good few years. Fifty years ago, you knew exactly who your neighbours were, and knew them well enough to ask to borrow something. Nowadays, we struggle to even conjure up their names.

Co-founder, Sam, discovered that asking to borrow things from the people in his community meant he got to know and like them better. After much discussion, the boys decided to utilise the internet to create an easy way for people to share things, skills and services in their community. Like a mutual Freecycle. They pooled their resources together, and Streetbank was born.

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Both a borrower and a lender be

I’ve been a member of Streetbank for a while now, and I’ve seen it grow from just one person in my community (erm, me) to 10 or 11. I can borrow everything from a pick axe to a box set of Six Feet Under (thankfully, not from the same person. That would be decidedly creepy.) I could also pick up two armchairs, and even learn how to tap dance — all for free.

The site really comes into its own in cities like London though, with more people signing up and a much wider variety of services and products on offer. It’s a really simple sign-up procedure, and you can offer anything from a small thing like a DVD, all the way up to a ladder or toolbox.

There’s a great opportunity for a small start up to offer their services to a select few to get some proof of concept before going properly live . Services don’t have to be free; you can ask for a small fee in exchange for your skill and time.

I like the idea of getting to know my community more, and the concept is sustainable, fun and interesting — which makes Streetbank a winner in my books.

What do you think? Like the idea of getting to know your community more?

As if his very worthy Fish Fight wasn’t enough, he’s now trying to help us clean up our energy.

The gang over at River Cottage has created Energyshare, a community group both online and off designed to help us find cleaner energy sources — and even create our own.

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Energyshare Fund

We’re all being encouraged to sign up, form groups and forge new relationships within our community so that we can start to produce our own carbon neutral power.

And thanks to a £500k fund, there’s the opportunity to apply for funding to get our energy scheme up and running.

British Gas is the sponsor, and it has promised an additional £3m over the next three years.

There are some great case studies of Energyshare groups that have already had funding and started energy-share projects.

Talybont-on-Usk is the first village in Wales to have their own community owned hydro. They sell all the energy generated into the grid to produce income that they then invest in community projects. So far, they have funded a cinema screen in their town hall, an electric car share club, and have financially supported Talybont residents to trial a variety of energy saving measures, including an electric bike scheme, energy audits and trials of energy meters, which have all helped them learn about ways they can have an impact on their energy use.

Image: Screengrab from Hugh’s About Energyshare video.

The quarterly is a mixture of almanac-, essay- and reportage-style articles, and stories are designed as an alternative to throwaway media.

Each issue brings you the very best of the past three months’ news, turning the UK’s “political, cultural, scientific and sporting life into a witty magazine of record.”

Slow Journalism measures news in months not minutes, returning to stories after the dust has settled. The Slow Journalism Company offers an antidote to throwaway media and makes a virtue of being the last to breaking news. Its publications are beautiful, collectible and designed to be treasured.

You can get issues of Delayed Gratification direct from its website. It costs between £40-£55 (depending on where you live) for a year’s subscription, or you can buy one issue for £12-£16. If you’d like to sample a little of the magazine first, there’s a preview over on Issuu. We’ve embedded it below for you.

Source: Slow Journalism Movement [It's Open]