Martha Dillon & Nina Carter: collecting London’s climate stories

Everyone has a story. Friends Martha Dillon and Nina Carter have an ambitious plan to collect climate stories from Londoners and excitingly are trialling their first 2026 workshop in Islington, this April. Interview by Nicola Baird

Martha Dillon and Nina Carter started working together in 2018 while planning a unique climate change magazine, It’s Freezing in LA!, with the designer Matthew Lewis at Candid Arts Trust’s café behind Angel tube. Professionally Martha advises cities on climate policy, helping cities to develop strategies to mitigate emissions, while Nina works as an illustrator and academic at Kingston School of Art specialising in ecological stories.

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Q: What’s the plan?

Martha: We’re running the workshop on Thursday 9 April with Islington Sustainability Network, and it’s kindly hosted by the King’s Head theatre off Upper Street. We’ll have different stations about different climate themes to capture different ways Londoners might be noticing the change in the climate or the impacts of the change in the climate. People will be invited to respond to those themes and hopefully share their stories, or even identify stories they might not know that they have, about how climate is affecting them.

Sometimes we find it really difficult to talk about climate, or we don’t have confidence in talking about climate, so in a lot of our work we explore how images, writing, even imagining, can make climate feel slightly less of a slippery and far away topic.

Q: How do you know if you’ve got a climate story?

Martha: Anyone can have a climate story. For example, everyone who was in London at the time of the 40 degree heat waves in 2022. Whatever you did that day is a climate story. I went to my office in Soho, central London because I wanted to go on the air-conditioned Elizabeth Line and because my flat was really hot. I knew the office would be slightly less hot than my flat: that is a climate story. Obviously, some people had much more extreme climate stories. Another example would be if you know friends and family who live abroad and who are also feeling climate impacts – they might have experienced storms and floods. We also want to hear what it feels like to live in London while your friends and family are abroad experiencing that that’s also a climate story.

Nina: To echo Martha, we live in a climate that’s changing so everyone has a climate story. Our job is to find ways to prompt people to locate and unearth their climate stories. We’re trying to do that by painting a picture of how aspects of our lives are woven into climate impacts so people recognise where they sit within this larger map.

Q: Why are you collecting stories about the climate?

Martha: The act of sharing stories is really old, and doing that with people around you can be very bonding, very intimate. There’s a wider way that it creates community, which is that it helps people realise that by experiencing or telling or sharing or reading a story, they’re not alone. You’ll know you weren’t the only one who is in a flat that is overheating or you weren’t the only person whose job pattern has had to change because it’s too hot or too expensive. So, there’s a community that forms around people realising that that they are part of something bigger than themselves. We’ve been hearing interviews with people about flats overheating – although heat isn’t the only climate impact – and people were embarrassed about talking about it. They felt like it was somehow their fault that they didn’t know how to control the space they lived in, or that they had moved to the wrong flat and didn’t realised that it wasn’t going to be equipped to cope with heat. There’s quite a lot of space for people to realise that they’re not the only ones that are experiencing these changes and also that these are impacts of climate change.

Nina: We’re using artworks, objects, sounds, images and writing to capture climate stories. We hope this will provide a range of ways in. Some visitors may be drawn to the artworks that conceptualise themes, or the objects that have a poetic quality, holding so much story. Other visitors will be moved most by images of change or oral histories. These will all be used to prompt the visitor into sharing their own stories, which will be added to the Bank.

Summing up

Now that the impacts of climate change are starting to affect our lives and plans, even here in Islington (see our collection of Energy Stories on the blog), it is great that the London Climate Story Bank is getting going, giving opportunities to share our stories, or find out more about other Londoners’ experiences.

Martha and Nina add: “There is some amazing climate work happening in Islington. We’re doing our first workshop with Islington Sustainability Network next, so please come along.”

Here’s wishing them luck. See you there.

Follow up

• Insta @ldnclimatestorybank
• In person Thursday 9 April 12-2pm. The event is open to any Islington based businesses, organisations or workers at the King’s Head Theatre, 116P Upper Street, N1. Book in advance here
• You can also send your story to londonsclimatestorybank@gmail.com
• More info about Islington Sustainability Network

Over to you

If you’d like to nominate someone to be interviewed who grew up, lives or works in Islington, or suggest yourself, please let me know, via nicolabaird dot green at gmail dot com. If you enjoyed this post you might like to look at the A-Z  index, or search by interviewee’s roles or Meet Islingtonians to find friends, neighbours and inspiration. Thanks for stopping by. Nicola