Growing in and around London

The day looked at approaches to growing food for London in or near the city, from domestic production, allotments and transformed public spaces to community food groups, city farms and the surviving working farms on London’s fringe.

Mayor Boris Johnson stumped in during the morning tea break, mug in hand, expressing his apparently unbounded support for urban agriculture in an off-the-cuff speech. He professed that he’d like nothing more than to uncork a bottle of London fizz at the opening of the olympics and asserted that there should be “a lot” of allotments in the city.

Production in decline

Like any city, the growth of London has pushed the production of food further from the centre, particularly over the last 200 years. Long gone are the times when lavender was grown on Lavender Hill and asparagus cultivated, rather than just sold, at Nine Elms.

The decline in production in the Greater London area even within the last 40 years is striking. In 1970, there were significant clusters of horticulture along the Lea Valley, in London’s south-west corner and along the Thames estuary. Today, only a handful of growers survive.

Potential for growth

Still, it’s not all concrete, bricks and tarmac. Two thirds of London’s area is still green space or water, with the potential to produce food. Even soil-less front gardens and window sills have potential for container growing, as promoted by Food up Front, “the urban growing network”.

The artist Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates project (documented and illustrated in his new book, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn: A Project by Fritz Haeg) targets the cult of the lawn, imported to the United States from England.

Haeg claims that lawns occupy more space than any agricultural sector in the US, and challenges their idolisation by transforming front lawns into productive gardens. In the UK, he led a transformation of a grassed communal space in front of social housing, now known as the Brookwood Edible Triangle.

Community groups can build strong links between city residents and the farms on the city fringe and beyond, as well as making the most of opportunities to grow food within the city.

Growing Communities, in Hackney, is one of the most inspiring examples, providing 450 households with mostly local, organic produce, some of it grown on their own inner-city sites such as their plot at Springfield Park, Clapton.

A growing imperative

With food prices rising fast, there’s an ever stronger personal incentive to grow even just some of our own food in whatever space we have available. Some of the most expensive foods, such as herbs and salad, are also the easiest to grow.

The total production of farming in the London area is estimated at £8 million / year, more or less £1 per person. If every Londoner grew just one pot of herbs on the kitchen window sill, that alone would be equivalent to London’s commercial agriculture.

The issues underlying the rise in food prices are an even stronger imperative for urban production. As Carolyn Steel points out in her excellent new book, Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives, 30 million meals have to be provided in London every day. Rising oil prices, declining resources and a growing population are placing an increasing strain on the mainstream models of food supply.

It’s time we started producing some of these meals closer to home.

Recommended reading on domestic growing and urban agriculture

• Growing round the houses, briefing paper on food production on housing estates, by Ben Reynolds (Sustain) and Christine Haigh (Women’s Environmental Network)
• Edible Cities, report on study visit to urban growing schemes in Milwaukee, Chicago and New York, by Ben Reynolds and others (Sustain)
• City Harvest, older but still instructive 1999 report on the potential for urban food production, by Tara Garnett (Sustain)

Related posts:

1. Waking up to food security
2. Reducing waste to feed the world
3. A Long Time in Food