David Spero's best photograph: Samson the shire horse and his band of eco-haymakers | Art and design
Tinkers Bubble will stay lodged in my memory for ever. When I recall it, I can smell the grass. It’s unique among low-impact, ecological communities around the UK in being almost entirely free of fossil fuel. They occasionally use paraffin lamps in winter, but all the work they do, they do manually. Haymaking takes place over a couple of days in June or July. I was spending a week there, volunteering and taking photographs, so I joined in.
We got up early each day, at about 4.30am, and worked until about 12, when we’d stop for lunch under a tree: bread, cheese, some cider. It is a beautiful bit of countryside, about a 20-minute walk from the nearest village, Stoke-sub-Hamdon in Somerset. And it was amazing to work in that ancient way, scything, using a pitchfork to turn the hay. You pick up a bundle and turn it in the air and watch it fall down. What made it really special was that we were doing it for Samson, the shire horse in the picture â€" it was all for his winter feed.
This photograph was taken on the second day, shortly after lunch. A strap on Samson’s harness broke and everyone had to stop. I went to sit under a tree, and when I looked over, I saw this timeless scene, which seemed to capture not just that moment but the culmination of the whole two days, and everything about life in the community. It’s one of only two handheld shots in my series. Immediate, and backlit to some extent, but with a beautiful light.
A trip to Glastonbury festival in 1994 first sparked my interest in this type of community. Some people were demonstrating how to build a bender â€" an eco-dwelling made of hazel-wood poles, bent and tied and covered with canvas. The structures we build and the communities they embody have always been a way of understanding the world, and these benders stuck with me. In 2004, I decided to record communities around the country living in these and other kinds of low-impact structures. Tinkers Bubble was the second I found â€" they’d been going for a decade already when I met them. It sounds like a fairytale name, but it’s the local name of a stream on the land where tinkers used to water their horses.
Scything is hard labour. Living this way is very hard â€" it takes a person with a good set of skills. And the community has fought hard to do what they do, with their appeals for planning permission going all the way to the High Court. In the 90s, the government decided their subsistence farming wasn’t a practical pattern of land use: it was not sustainable in any wider national sense that other people could live like this. But after the Conservatives lost the election, in 1997, the community reapplied. In 1999, they got permission to continue for five years. This permission has since been renewed and extended but it still remains temporary.
The beauty of the scene captured here is countered by the weight of the politics. But it also represents this idea of a simpler life. Like Henry David Thoreau spending a couple of years in his hut at Walden Pond, it taps into a desire to figure out what you truly need in life. At Tinkers Bubble, when someone is poorly, everyone helps. They eat communally every day, taking turns to cook.
Samson died a few years after this photograph was taken, and is buried on the grounds. He was a great horse â€" it took the community a long while to find another. Horses are central to everything they do, from the communal logging business to pub outings. There is another shot, of everyone coming back from their local, where we’d gone for a drink. There’s something very special about going to the pub in a horse-driven cart, tying him up on the street outside and sitting in the garden so we can keep an eye on him.
Life inside Tinkers Bubble is refreshing, and I remember how amazed I was on my first visit. I parked my car and walked up a path through an orchard, past Samson grazing in his field, climbed over a solar-powered electric fence, walked past allotments and polytunnels, solar panels and a wind generator and then up a steep hill that got steeper. At the top, sheltered from view under a canopy of Douglas fir, were a handful of dwellings arranged around the communal roundhouse. Each first visit I made to a community was wonderful. I felt as if I’d arrived in a parallel reality. I couldn’t believe that, in 21st-century, Britain people were living like this.
David Spero’s CV
Born: London, 1963.
Trained: MA of photography, Royal College of Art, London.
Influences: Robert Adams, Walker Evans, Roger Fenton and Philip K Dick.
High point: Going to press last January for the Settlements book â€" 12 years after taking the first photograph.
Top tip: Work on the things that inspire and fascinate you, and follow the path they take you on.
• Settlements by David Spero is out now.
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