East Hounslow’s London Road isn’t exactly a bucolic vision. In fact, it’s a major thoroughfare in west London, studded with take-aways and fuggy with traffic fumes.
Nevertheless, after walking for just a few minutes, I find a small but thriving urban farm. It’s one of the sites occupied by Cultivate London, an urban farm and social enterprise based across various formerly derelict spaces in the west of the city. I’m here to find out why urban farming is enjoying such a boom.
Problems with the global food system have rarely been out of the headlines. Massive rises in the prices of staple foods sparked riots across more than 25 countries in 2008 – and the price of basics is expected to double by 2030.
Even in rich cities such as London, this has started to hurt people: it’s one of the reasons why we’re seeing an increase in the number of families who rely on food banks to survive. Meanwhile, our dependence on food imports causes a huge carbon footprint.
But an urban food revolution has sprung up in response. With Cultivate London part of an assortment of urban farms, orchards, city bee-keepers, office block rooftop gardens and even a King’s Cross vineyard, it’s getting easier for Londoners to source many of their meals from within the M25 – and a similar picture is emerging in cities all around the country.
In central Nottingham, for example, a project by RHS Britain In Bloom, which turned the equivalent of 2,000 football pitches of derelict land into community spaces, has transformed a piece of neglected land in a deprived area of the city into a community allotment serving 7,000 people.
Adrienne Attorp, Cultivate London’s general manager, shows me around the polytunnels and cages where all varieties of salad are grown. She sets me to turning over the soil, joined by farm trainee volunteers who have been referred by the local Jobcentre and various other programmes.
It’s fun and I can imagine what a sense of satisfaction it must give to look after something from seed to harvest. But with my shoulders aching after a few minutes, I realise it’s harder work than it looks. This is a sunny, crisp afternoon – but the recent spate of storms must have made life tough.
‘Unlike many rural farmers who have been facing serious flooding and wind damage as a result of the storms, we have actually been relatively lucky,’ says Attorp. ‘The high winds damaged one of our polytunnels slightly, but it was nothing serious. However, there are more storms on the way, so we will just have to react as needed. It’s really hard in the summer when it gets hot, too – you really don’t want to be sweating inside one of those tunnels. But we have a ball digging outside in the sunshine.’
Ben Mann has previously worked on food-growing projects in Guatemala and Vietnam, and he directed Best Before, a short documentary about London’s food revolution. He doesn’t believe locally sourced food needs to be a fad that’s the preserve of the rich.
‘As food growing spaces are becoming more accessible, urban food is becoming more affordable,’ he says. ‘There has been a rise in the number of places to buy this food – local food co-ops, farmers’ markets and more affordably priced vegetable box schemes.’
It’s not easy to fight the good fight in Britain, though. No matter how innovative our use of city space, our land is at too much of a premium.
Attorp compares London to the huge urban farming scene forming part of the regeneration movement in Detroit, where the useable spaces are vast by comparison.
‘You are never going to have the space you need to grow or to meet all of London’s food needs but it’s a good supplement,’ she says. ‘And promoting it to city kids can be a great way of reconnecting them with where food comes from.’
‘Though a very small quantity of food is being produced, urban food has the capacity to be far greater in quantity,’ says Mann. ‘But, most crucially, it challenges the model of the global food system. It shows we can change the distance of supply, from the global to the local.’
— source metro.co.uk