Launch event, 28 October 2025. With thanks to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation for the funding for publication and launch event, we launched and celebrated the final Anthology as part of the York Environment Festival. Click here for details of the launch event
To obtain your copy (pay-as-you-feel donation plus £5 postage) please e-mail info@planetsouthbank.org.uk and we will send you bank transfer details.
Click here for download of the Anthology, and FAQ’s about the project.
How We Made It Through – A Community Creative Writing Project to Picture the Future that We Want to Build
Here we share the key ideas behind the project, and resources to help you run your own How We Made It Through for your own locality or setting.
In 2023, Planet South Bank member John Gray shared an idea with us which he had been brewing for some time. How do we tell better stories to guide us through the polycrisis in which we find ourselves today? In most of our media we see only dystopian visions of our future, ravaged by climate change and worsening authoritarianism. But on the other hand, utopian visions of the future often feel naïve and unrealistic. It was here that John introduced us to the work of the environmental philosopher Rupert Read, who argues for the necessity of ‘thrutopias’. Thrutopias combine realism with hope. They are stories which accept the severity of the difficult times ahead, but remain hopeful that we can make it through.
The idea, then, was simple but powerful: let’s tell stories about our own neighbourhood, in the future where we’ve made it through. We hoped that both the stories themselves, and the act of coming together to make them, would generate the community connection and shared hope that we all need to bring these futures into being. It was here that our project was born. Planet South Bank was founded with the vision of creating a more resilient, more resourceful, and more connected community in our neighbourhood of South Bank, York – so the idea of How We Made It Through felt like a natural step in pursuit of this vision. We started planning in the autumn and by the start of 2024 we were ready to launch.
The title of the project outlined its core parts:
How – The stories had to focus on the practical details of how the people of South Bank responded, adapted, and ultimately made it through the polycrisis.
We – The project was aimed specifically at residents of the South Bank area, and we encouraged people to set their stories within the neighbourhood– to build that sense of connection with the place that we call home, and to emphasise that we make it through as a community, not as isolated individuals.
Made It – The stories didn’t have to be fluffy or positive– in fact, participants were actively encouraged to sit with the reality of just how scary the future seems– but they did have to be hopeful. One of the few conditions we imposed on participants is that no matter what story you want to tell, the people of South Bank have to make it!
Through – The backdrop of the project and of the stories is the overlapping and interconnected set of ecological and political crises that we can call the ‘polycrisis’. Encompassing everything from climate instability and ecological collapse to political turmoil, we didn’t require participants to focus on any particular aspect of the polycrisis, but it was important that we accepted the scientific reality of there being something which we have to get through.
Running over six months until a submission deadline of 31st July 2024, we put the call out through flyers, posters, social media, radio interviews, and word of mouth. Twenty people responded initially and once our programme of free workshops and online calls kicked off, more joined along the way. We ran all the creative exercises and individual themed workshops both online and in person, to increase accessibility for our participants. By the end of the project, we had received the work of more than thirty individual entries, and media ranging from prose to poetry, and from collage to needle felt. The generous support of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Abundance Press pulled all of our work into a beautiful book, a digital copy of which will be available here when the anthology is launched in late October 2025.
There are a lot of things that, in our minds, are beautiful about this project. But one of the most beautiful things is that it is easily reproducible in any neighbourhood. On this page, you can find lots more information and guidance about how we ran the project. All our templates and documents are free to share. We hope it can allow for more projects like these to generate local hopefulness across the country and beyond.
A link to an explainer on ‘Thrutopias’
‘A New Technology’ Workshop Template
Planet South Bank 