Host: Libby Peake, head of resource policy and senior fellow, Green Alliance
Guest: Patrick Grant, Clothing designer, businessman and judge of BBC’s Sewing Bee

Introduction

Libby Peake: Welcome to the Green Alliance podcast. We are the charity and think tank that is dedicated to achieving ambitious leadership for the environment. I’m Libby Peake. I’m head of resource policy and senior fellow at Green Alliance, and I’m delighted to be joined today by Patrick Grant, clothing designer, businessman, and judge of BBC’s Sewing Bee, among plenty of other labels I could give him.

We’re going to talk today about his new book, “Less,” which I’d describe as an impassioned defense of quality of workmanship and manufacturing, and of the idea that we should stop buying so much rubbish. And I personally love this idea, as it’s expressed in the subheader, which also says that this will make us happier as a society.

It touches on various everyday objects, but focuses in on the fashion industry that he’s been operating in for decades, and which now seems to be based on the idea that we should have more, always more. And the book contains some pretty startling statistics. We’ve done quite a bit of work in this area, but I didn’t know that it was this shocking, including that some fast fashion brands are now releasing 2,000 new styles a month. And one in particular, Shein, was, as of 2022, releasing close to 4,000 new styles a day, which is pretty staggering.

The book starts with a trot through history and examines how we got here, starting with very early pre-industrial paucity, when a new set of clothing would cost the equivalent of a servant’s yearly wages, through to the rise of the brand and of American consumerism, and on to today. And that history is where I want to start as well today.

Patrick, welcome to the podcast by the way. I’m curious to know if you think we ever got it right. And as I’m sure you’re not suggesting we go back to the day of pre-industrial paucity where we only have one set of clothes. So what’s your vision for getting it right? And how do we get there?

The history of quality, work and consumption

Patrick Grant: Well, I think the book sort of plots three kind of concurrent curves. We have this curve of quality, we have this curve of work, and we have this curve of consumption. And all three hit sort of peaks and troughs at different points.

When I started writing the book, actually, I tried to tell the story in one integrated mass, but then I realised that because of all these different timings amongst the ups and downs of these different things, it would be very difficult to do that. But there were times in our history when the quality of the things that we bought reached a peak. And I think that time was sometime around about the 1940s, ’50s, even into the 1960s. We had developed the ability to make extraordinary quality objects. And we had to develop the ability to make them in a way that was affordable to most people so that things were democratic. Everybody could afford a certain amount of the good things in life.

But that was sort of 20, 30 years after, particularly American corporations had realised that making things well was actually counter to their interests. Their interests were better served by making lower quality things that encouraged us to consume more. And what was really shocking to me was that that was quite a deliberate policy on the part of many businesses. Don’t give people good stuff. Give them stuff that’s just good enough that they will accept it. And over time, let’s reduce the quality of things rather than increase them.

The interesting thing was from the very dawn of time, from the start of human interaction with tools and made objects, we had always strived to make the very best things that we could because in the early days literally our lives depended on it. If we didn’t have a sharp spear, we couldn’t kill a mammoth. If we didn’t have well-made mortars and pestles, we couldn’t mush up the grains that we ate. And all of those people that did all of that work were extraordinarily valued within our society because they were the people that had the skill to literally keep us alive—the people that made the clothes that kept us warm, the people that made all of the things that we operated with.

I think there is a natural human inclination to want to make things well, and this links then into the work side. When we’re given a lump of wood and a sharp tool, our natural human inclination will be to try and make something beautiful and wonderful from it, and we will work really hard to do that, and it will give us great pleasure to work in that way. There’s a very primal sense of satisfaction when you have created something using your mind and your hands.

The shift in manufacturing and consumption

Patrick Grant: So not only were the objects good, but the work was good, and we enjoyed a sort of golden age of manufacturing goods right up until the point at which mass manufacturing started to kind of remove some of that. And I think, again, the interesting part about that is that even at the early part of mechanisation was about allowing humans to do the more interesting, more skilled bits by taking away the sort of drudgery of some of the repetitive or the particularly physically difficult stuff.

But again, all of these things have an arc, and we move from that moment or that period where machines are helping humans to make things well to the period where we’ve redesigned the objects that we use in order to allow them to be made by machines in a way that is compromised but which is cheaper and in which they can be produced in greater volume because the inclination of those businesses is to sell those things in greater volume to us.

Patrick Grant: I think the thing that was most startling to me about this was the realisation that for most of human existence, we had been encouraged to live happily with few things. All of our religious and moral teachings were not to be envious and not to be greedy. We were told that this was how we would live a happy and contented life. And for thousands of years, that was how we got along.

Economists realised that sort of money is not a fixed amount, that the global economy is not a zero-sum entity, and that by consuming more, making more, creating more, you could create more money. And more specifically, you could create more wealth for those people who already had wealth. And this was a kind of watershed moment.

If you read Adam Smith, you certainly get a sense that Smith felt like this was a force for good. But what it did was it opened the door to a new form of capitalism that in its current form in its 2025 form is only doing a bunch of harm apart from for a very small handful of very rich people who are benefiting from it.

The modern system’s problems

Patrick Grant: A system that used to create value for everybody created value for the growers of the raw materials or the miners of the raw materials or those people that created those raw materials. It created value for the people who produced goods from those things. There was value for those people who selected and wholesale and retail those things, and of course there was value for the consumer, and there was value for multiple consumers for the same object because an object that was made well is used by multiple people throughout its life, and at the end of its life it would naturally biodegrade and disappear back into the soil and so the circle would be repeated.

Now we have a system where almost nobody benefits from any of this activity. We start with oil in most of the products we work with. In the world of clothing, today about 70% of the textiles are oil-based, and that number is always rising. The people that manufacture the clothes receive absolutely no benefit whatsoever. Channel 4 exposed Shein for paying their garment workers three pence a garment. That is of no value to anybody in the manufacturing process.

The consumer gets a product that is appalling quality and cannot be resold, so literally its value drops to zero the moment it’s purchased. And of course the planet suffers because it has to bear the brunt of the carbon cost of the production of all this stuff, the waste materials from its dyeing, the wastewater. And then, of course, it has to cope with the discarded plastic fabric fragments that end up—a third of our ocean microplastics come from our clothes.

And then, of course, there is what do we do with this ever-growing literal mountain of discarded plastic clothing? There’s no benefit to anybody. That is an almost entirely valueless system. There is only one person benefiting from all of that, and that’s the person who trousers the profit.

Libby Peake: Okay, so we’ve got to the heart of the matter really quite quickly. I think you’re taking on modern-day capitalism and all of the problems it causes. But we’re speaking today on the morning of this spring statement and in a context where the government has made growth in GDP its overarching mission. And it seems to us a lot recently, it’s been doing so by making the environment the enemy of growth. And I think that stands in stark contrast to a lot of the points.

Patrick Grant: I think the important point about an economy is who it serves. We are very quickly moving towards an economy that creates no value for most people here.

If I think about the way the clothing industry or almost all manufacturing and selling industry used to be, if you take the way we bought clothes in 1972 when I was born, those clothes were made in this country. So the work involved in scouring and spinning and weaving and dying and knitting and sewing those clothes—all of that was done in a way that was very distributed around the UK.

So there were wages being paid, there was national insurance being paid, there was income tax being paid, there were business rates and rents being paid and all of that money was flowing to thousands and thousands of small local economic systems generating more economic activity because all of that money was being spent locally.

The sale of all of that product was done in a distributed fashion through physical stores. Those physical stores employed people all around the country and they pay taxes and national insurance and those shops pay rent and business rates and all of that flowed into the local economy and all of those staff spent money locally, and those businesses that sold those things, both the manufacturers and the retailers, all were domiciled in the UK, and they all paid UK business taxes, corporate taxes. So there was a huge amount of tax being generated, and it was generating secondary and tertiary spending all across the country.

The Modern Fast Fashion Model

Patrick Grant: Now if we look at buying something from Shein, you spend your money, and the money you spend, there is a small amount of VAT, which of course always existed in the other model too. But that is the only thing that happens in the UK. I mean, effectively almost nothing, apart from the final bit of that distribution, which is by people that are on zero-hours contract, paid almost nothing. It’s a very unhealthy, unhelpful concentrated economy that does very little for anybody apart from those ultimate owners and financial beneficiaries.

The products that are being consumed—we’re consuming considerably more product, but those products don’t give us any greater satisfaction. The idea that by buying new things every day, we’re somehow going to feel better, well, it’s completely not true. We know fine well from survey data that people don’t feel any happier now than they did 50 years ago, and they’ve got 10 times as much stuff.

So we have to think about what the economy does. We have to think about where the money goes. There’s been a huge amount of talk about AI. AI might well increase the efficiency of an operation, but it kills a job. What do we want our economy to do? Do we want it to serve our citizens or do we want it to serve the wealthy? Because ultimately, if you go down the route where you’re automating and generating efficiency through the use of automation, robotics, and AI, what you are in fact doing is just taking away jobs. And that doesn’t seem to make a great deal of sense as a government whose job is to serve the people.

I think the government’s own report, the previous government’s report, I think it was 21, 22, PWC did this report. And they reckon that something like 30% of all existing jobs are going to be taken away by automation and robotics and AI. Now, they claim that new jobs will be created, but the new jobs that will be created are for people with very advanced learning capabilities. They’re academic, and a great deal of the UK population are not people who are brilliant at maths and computer science. They’re just ordinary people. They might be people that are good with their hands, good with their minds. We’re creating an economy that only works for a very small subset of the population.

And if you allow an economy to be developed around the idea of ever-increasing amounts of consumption—I think it is worth pointing out that all of the businesses in my industry, those fast fashion businesses, can only exist if they get us to buy more stuff all the time.

And we have to buy more stuff because their turnovers need to increase or their profits need to increase or both or they’re toast. So the only way they can survive is by getting us to buy more stuff. The cheaper the stuff gets, the more stuff they need to get us to buy. And stuff is getting cheaper. Well, it’s not getting cheaper, it’s just getting lower quality, but we pay less for it. And so we end up with an economy that’s just consuming, literally creating mountains of garbage, the activity of which is of no value to most citizens.

Alternative economic models

Patrick Grant: So I really think we’re just getting it badly wrong. And it isn’t that difficult actually to incentivise an alternative version, you know, a lower consumption, higher value economy where the value is created and stays within the UK economy. You do really simple things, like you can change the VAT rate on things that are made locally. And almost all the things that are made locally tend to be much higher quality because there’s no point paying five times as much for the labour and then using the same terrible quality raw materials. You might as well make something good.

If you’re going to spend that money on the production, you might as well use good materials and those good materials tend to have a much lower environmental footprint. And of course the objects themselves then survive for much longer because they’re much higher quality. They give the owners much greater pleasure. They create a secondary economy because people then feel like it’s worth repairing them. They create a further secondary economy because it’s then worth selling them second hand and third hand and fourth hand. And all of that activity happens locally. You’re not sending things back to China to be repaired, you’re taking them to somebody down the road to be repaired. If you’re selling things secondhand, all of that activity happens within either your local region or your country.

Libby Peake: I find it really refreshing that you’re talking about and taking on the ideas of overconsumption head-on because that’s something that in the world of policy and politics that we operate in is quite often it feels taboo and off-limits. It’s consistently underfunded by mental funders, politicians won’t talk about it, NGOs won’t talk about it.

And I’ll give you a couple of examples. We had an event where Ed Miliband was talking about climate policy, and someone in the audience who wasn’t me, it wasn’t a plant, asked him, should we just be consuming less? And I would have thought that his answer could have been something along the lines of we need to talk about consuming differently, at the very least. But his answer was just, no, it’s clearly not a vote winner.

Then I’ve also had conversations with some of the main campaigning environmental NGOs who you would think are going to be shouting, “Let’s stop buying so much rubbish,” as you’ve said. But they’ve said privately, although they do individual campaigns, some of them very effective on things like plastic pollution or deforestation. The idea of just taking on consumption is something that they don’t want to do necessarily because it will make them seem like dirty hippies advocating that we go back to wearing hair shirts.

And so it feels like a lot of people think this isn’t ever going to be a popular message with the public. And I wonder how you found taking your message to the public.

Value vs. volume

Patrick Grant: When you talk about consumption, there is a tendency to confuse volume and value. You can have an economy that consumes exactly the same value, but which consumes a tiny fraction of the volume. I think that is the important thing to recognise here.

We could build an economy, and I did a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society about this about four or five years ago, and I did a very sort of rough back-of-a-fact packet calculation on what the economic value to the UK would be if we switched from the current mode of clothing consumption to a different mode of clothing consumption where we consumed considerably fewer numbers of new but much better value, much better quality pieces. So the economic value and at the same time also created a much larger second-hand section as a result of those new things now being worth selling second hand.

I did an event at an organisation about recycling. And the head of the British textile recycling association said to me privately, no one in the world wants secondhand Primark. Most of what is being consumed now is literally rubbish the moment it is bought. So we can create an economy that supports high value, low volume consumption and secondary consumption of all of these things, which dramatically reduces its environmental footprint, significantly shifts the job focus from only retailing to retailing, making, remaking, recycling, and creates opportunity for a very different section of the population to find good work.

We’re in this mad thing where we feel like the value of an economy has to be driven by increasing volume and actually it doesn’t. We can build a bigger economy by consuming fewer things and in the process push more of the value of that activity into our pockets rather than stuffing it into the pockets of Jeff Bezos and others who put nothing back.

I did a TED talk about this a while ago. The 1880s in Lancashire, 80% of the business owners were local. They were born within the county. And of course, in that situation, even that surplus that is produced works its way back into the local economy, even if it’s just through local philanthropy. You know, if you look at the public buildings in places like Blackburn and Burnley and others where we work, all of those big civic projects, the hospitals, the schools, the town halls, the public gardens, all of that was the surplus from all of that local economic activity. Now, none of that surplus filters back into the local economy at all. It disappears off somewhere else, and that is a huge problem for us.

Inequality and consumption

Libby Peake: One of the other topics I want to talk about is inequality, which is something that you touch on at various points in your book. And note that the UK is the second most unequal society after the US. And I do wonder, it’s something that I’ve been thinking about quite a lot, because it seems like this inequality makes high levels of consumption really difficult to tackle and it interacts with environmental policies in various ways.

For starters, it makes a lot of the environmental policies that might be quite effective off limits because of the distributional impact it might have on the least well off in society, but then also it really interacts with consumption in lots of different ways. So we know that high income people, people who have a lot of wealth tend to consume a lot more, tend to have massively higher carbon impact.

But also, there’s a quote that I quite like that suggests that in unequal society, people in all bits of the wealth spectrum, the poverty spectrum, are likely to be driven to consume more because trickle-down economics hasn’t been a thing that has ever manifested, but trickle-down consumption is something that you do observe really unequal societies where there’s status and anxiety and people are driven to consume more but cheaper.

And I really liked that you brought in the Terry Pratchett boot theory which is a wealthy person actually can end up spending a lot less on things because they buy one pair of boots that’s really good and that lasts for decades whereas someone who’s less well off is going to buy a very cheap pair of boots that last for a year or two and still have wet feet. And I think that’s something that we see a lot in things like clothing and in a lot of consumer electronics where people who don’t have enough money are sort of trapped in a cycle of buying cheap and buying often. And so I wonder the extent to which you feel it’s possible to tackle overconsumption before we address head-on issues of inequality in our society.

Patrick Grant: It is a really tough one because there are a lot of people with very, very little money in this country, and that is an enormous problem that we have to deal with because it affects all of us. And I think the idea that we think it might not is completely barmy. But we have been molded into sort of consuming machines. And I think it’s really damaging because I think, as you quite rightly say, the pressure on people on lower income to continue to spend is really relentless.

We cannot escape the machine that is trying to con us into thinking we need new stuff all the time. And I mean, I walked into one of those giant sort of homeware shops and literally everything in it was pure garbage. Like sparkly nonsense that was just purely designed to get people who are already feeling unhappy and already down on their luck, to encourage them to think that by buying some of these shiny baubles their life is somehow going to get better. And of course it isn’t, they just end up with houses full of low quality horrible stuff and they have worse offers as a result of it.

And actually the truth of it is, I mean obviously we can’t prove this, but you’ve got to sort of get the sense that 300 years ago people had almost nothing but they weren’t any less happy. And I think the point about all of this is that the way that lower income people consume, the things that they are consuming give no benefit back to them at all. Like, it’s not like the objects themselves give them any joy, but certainly again, the economic activity doesn’t come back to them in any meaningful way.

Whereas in the past, there were jobs for people of all educational attainments and there were jobs for people who were slower starters in life and there were opportunities for those people to climb up the ladder. The guy that runs my factory started as a 16-year-old in the cutting room and worked his way up to being the factory manager. In a world where sort of all the jobs are AI jobs and all the jobs are kind of finance jobs or health jobs, he wouldn’t have stood a chance. There wouldn’t have been an opportunity for him to find himself and find the thing he’s good at.

And I feel like there is this sort of relentless machine that’s advertising to us almost constantly. I saw a clip of Brian Eno saying that we’re fed 10,000 adverts a day. We see 10,000 adverts a day. They may not manifest themselves as adverts, but they are things that are encouraging us to consume more. And it doesn’t matter what income level you’re on. Everybody has a phone and that phone is just selling you shit every time you look at it.

The only thing that people are being told is new stuff is what you need. New, new, new, new, new, new, new is what people hear. They don’t hear anything that says, you know what? Go for a nice walk. Go and watch the birds sing. Enjoy a little bit of crafting, go repair something, do something simple that makes you feel good. All they’re told is that they need to keep buying stuff.

Libby Peake: It’s a really massive thing to take on though, the advertising industry.

Consumer choice and impact

Patrick Grant: Well, again, we all have the ability to choose what we spend our money on. And we can all choose to put our money where we want it to go. Obviously, I abhor Amazon and I never shop on Amazon because I feel like Amazon is just hollowing out our economy, it’s empty spending. You spend with them, none of it comes back to us. We can all choose to think about the things we consume in terms of the value that they create. Where do we want our money to go? Who do we want it to go to?

I’m sitting on a chair that’s probably 200 years old that was probably made in High Wickham, the centre of a kind of Windsor chair making. This desk is Danish. It’s made from teak. I mean, I know where all this stuff comes from. I’m wearing a t-shirt that was made in Blackburn. I’m wearing a pair of trousers made in Blackburn. The socks were made in West Sussex.

I know the people that made this stuff. And it’s very empowering to be able to think that actually you can control the economy. If everybody decided to not buy the bad stuff and to buy the good stuff instead, things would change overnight. It isn’t going to happen, but it could happen. It could start to happen and it could happen in a way that actually has some sort of meaningful momentum behind it.

Also, just the process of thinking about the things we’re going to buy actually becomes an enjoyable activity. If all we’re doing is just impulse buying stuff time after time after time, we lose all of that enjoyment in the planning, the anticipation. I grew up in the 1970s. I had to wait to buy something because things were expensive, but I would go back to a clothes shop and try something on probably three or four times before I actually bought it and that whole process was really enjoyable to me. I spent time thinking about the value of all of these things is still in my possession. Whereas, somebody who spends their life buying all this cheap stuff, they’ve got nothing to show for it.

Public perceptions and quality

Libby Peake: We’ve got some relevant polling that we did about a year ago, which was actually specifically about clothing and how people feel about their clothing and what they want to see to make it a greener industry. And there were some really positive things in there. Like there was lots of support and an understanding that we need to reduce the amount of clothing that we’re buying, we need to reuse more. They want to see targets for reduction and then reuse and then recycling. They were all in favour of them, but reduction was the most popular. They were outraged that perfectly usable clothing is destroyed.

But one thing that really quite surprised me was that very few people seem to be thinking about the provenance of their clothes, because we ask them, do you care or do you think about the environmental impact of your clothing? And only 3% said yes. And then when we asked about the labor conditions that people who make the clothing face, there was more, but it wasn’t an overwhelming majority. It was 52%. And actually, I was really surprised. Only 35% of people said that they were frustrated about the quality of clothing. So it feels like there’s still a perception issue.

Patrick Grant: Honestly, I think the reason behind that, and again, I’ve thought about this a lot whilst writing the book and since, is that my mum’s generation, I mean, I think just about my generation, certainly my granny’s generation, inherently understood quality. But we now have millions and millions of people who are growing up, never ever having experienced what actual good quality clothes are like. So they have no frame of reference.

I did a documentary for the BBC about making the uniform for the coronation and there was this really super lovely bit where one of the officers from one of the cavalry regiments talked about new recruits trying on their boots for the first time. And he said, so many of them had to do a sort of double take. They were like, “what, what are these?” And they said, well, you know, those are boots, but they’d only ever worn trainers. And they’d never worn wool clothes before. So they didn’t know the feel of like a woolen great coat was so alien to them.

And I remember sitting on the tube once and just looking at the clothes that lots and lots of people were wearing and thinking, many of these people here will never have worn anything other than 100% synthetic clothes. So they have no idea that there is another level of quality that they could be enjoying. You pull on a pair of polyester socks, they feel horrible, but if you’ve never known what it feels like to pull on a wool sock or a cotton sock, you don’t know that what you’re wearing is terrible.

So I’m not surprised that only a third of people say that quality is an issue, because they just haven’t got a frame of reference to benchmark that against.

Responsibility for change

Libby Peake: I do still have a question about where you would place the responsibility, because it feels like, obviously, we do, a lot of people do have a choice. I think in an unequal society where there are so many pressures to consume, it might not feel to a lot of people like they do have a choice. Actually, that polling we did, we asked as well, like, where do you think responsibility lies? And quite a large majority of 58% said businesses.

I think if I could talk to them, I’d explain to them that actually the governments and the policymakers, they could do so much, but it feels like people aren’t placing the responsibility there. So I’m curious, where do you think the responsibility lies?

Patrick Grant: Well, I mean, the businesses are never going to change. You are not going to, all of a sudden—I mean, it’s obviously laughable to look at their attempts to make themselves look socially and environmentally responsible. There is a sort of endless amount of greenwashing that has been very, very effective across the cheap fashion industry, but they can’t change. You know, you can’t be a business that’s today pumping out a billion pieces of clothing at an ever-cheaper rate. You can’t all of a sudden say, “You know what? We’re going to be a quality clothing supplier instead.” They do what they do, or they’re gone. I think that’s the sad truth.

Clothing vs. fashion

Patrick Grant: We call ourselves community clothing for a very specific reason, because we make clothing, we don’t make fashion. I think there’s a really interesting point at which the world used to do both, and people used to consume both. People used to consume clothes, which were sort of everyday, high quality, long lasting, simple, well made, and they used to consume fashion, which had a shorter shelf life that was more ephemeral.

Most people would have a wardrobe that was a percentage of both, either the less fashionable or people that were more kind of style over fashion would consume maybe 80, 90% clothing and 10% fashion, but then the very fashionable would be sort of 90% fashion and 10% clothing. But we all had a bit of both in our wardrobes.

And people like Marks and Spencers and others used to sell clothing. That was the clothing department, the home department, the whatever department. And at a certain point in time, and I think it was probably around about the mid-90s, maybe onwards, everybody went fashion. Everyone who used to sell clothes, in a desperate bid to keep themselves going in the face of very intense competition from those fast fashion businesses, decided to move in the same direction. Sort of everybody just flooded out of clothing and now the percentage of businesses that make what I would call clothing is very very small indeed.

They are still there. There are people that make good shoes, people that make good jumpers, people that make good raincoats. And again some of those fashion businesses have little bits of clothing in them. But I think we’ve all gone sort of mad. All businesses have just gone tearing off in that direction. And actually, as we’ve now discovered, that’s terrible for people and terrible for the planet and actually terrible for consumers.

So it’s almost like we need to start again. We need to support the ones that exist in the clothing world. I mean, I’d also think there is a place for some fashion in the world. As individuals, we like to change our clothes. We love to be part of something that feels creative and interesting and beautiful. But it has to be done in a way where it again, it creates value.

There has to be, you know, there will never be a time when a pair of Vivian Westwood pirate trousers are not going to be desirable to somebody. But that’s because Vivian Westwood was a great designer. And the clothes you produce have to have real integrity and great materials, they’re expensive. But there’s something special about them that will hold their value forever. You know, a 1920s Chanel jacket, a ’60s Saint Laurent, you know, whatever it is, those things have enduring value and were made well.

But most of what today is called fashion has no value at all. It’s designed by AI, oil-based, terrible quality materials. That has no place in the world. So actually, we’ve got to try and rebalance that as well and encourage the businesses that do do good and incentivise them. And if it comes to it, create VAT incentives or something that encourages the good stuff and discourages the bad stuff. We’ll make a shitload more tax revenue anyway if we’re onshoring high quality materials and high quality clothes. I think it’s just about balance.

Conclusion

Libby Peake: That’s really useful. And I suppose a good note to end on, on the idea of getting joy out of fashion, I actually want to share with you a bit of history that you and I have that you won’t remember. You weren’t just a judge on Sewing Bee, you’re actually a judge at Eroica. So I don’t know if you can see this. Can you see this? It’s a Bobby Dazzler.

Patrick Grant: Wow. I mean, nobody is missing you.

Libby Peake: Just for the benefit of this, it’s a purple one-piece with a sort of very lurid print sleeves. I mean, it is special. I’m sharing a picture of five women who’ve been selected by Patrick for the best dressed gal competition at the 2018 Eureka Vintage Cycling Festival. I mean, you look very proud of it. It’s a very powerful stance.

Patrick Grant: Did I pick you as the winner?

Libby Peake: You did not. I didn’t get any of the prizes.

Patrick Grant: Well, my apologies, Libby.

Libby Peake: I wanted to bring it up because at the time I was a bit sad not to win, but I remember that the prize was a pair of panniers, which I definitely didn’t need, because I have a really good set of panniers that I’ve cycled across Canada with. They’ve served me well, and they will continue to do so. So I think I actually just wanted to remind you of this instance, but also to end with a thank you for not burdening me with something that I didn’t need or I didn’t want in the context of this conversation.

Patrick Grant: Well, retrospectively, you’re welcome. (both laughing)

Libby Peake: But thank you so much for sharing your insights. It’s been a fascinating conversation.

Patrick Grant: Thank you, it’s really been a pleasure.

Outro

Libby Peake: Thank you for listening to this episode. Keep checking in as we will continue to bring you specialist interviews and highlights from our events here on your podcast feed. You can subscribe on your favorite podcast app and you can follow us at Green Alliance UK on X and Green Alliance on LinkedIn and Blue Sky. We encourage you