by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Rising food prices and the increased interest in healthy, ideally local, food means more that more and more people are looking to grow their own. What could be better than organic food from nigh on just outside your front or back door?
Growing Round the Houses, a 2008 briefing paper by Ben Reynolds of Sustain and Christine Haigh of the Women’s Environmental Network (WEN), explains how social housing providers and their tenants can work together on their estates to grow food.
As well giving advice on how to set up a food growing project on their estate, it describes examples such as the Spitalfields Estate Community Garden, where residents worked together to build themselves a food growing space for vegetables and herbs popular with the local ethnic minority community.
With urban allotments like gold dust, and about as easy to get hold of, housing estates, with wide, underused green spaces are coming into their own, turning over their lawns to food growing plots. But it is not only the lawns and such spaces that can be used but all the bits of bare earth and even the “hared standings” that are wasted. All can be turned over to a green oasis where food is grown for all.
While this may be the case for real urban allotments in other areas, even not that far out of London – in fact in one of the outlying boroughs of the capital – allotments go begging as no one seems to want them. But that is, really, neither here nor there. The fact is that allotments, in most places, are in real demand.
There is an incredible interest in growing your own food and, and while it did not start directly round about the same time when the recession hit but a little before, it was, to some extent, the Great Recession that set it really off. Vegetable seed is overtaking flower seed sales for the first time in a very long time; probably since the “Dig for Victory” campaign of World War Two. Hopefully this and this publication, though now a few years old and available only as a PDF download, will be the catalyst for a new dawn for urban agriculture.
The paper certainly provides inspiration and useful guidance for residents and social landlords looking to set up similar projects. The problem, as I see it, though, is persuading landlords to allow residents to have a go at such projects. We all know what councils can be like and, as far as housing goes, their successors in the housing stock game, the Housing Associations.
According to Simon Donovan, the community development manager at Tower Hamlets Community Housing, the food growing project on the Spitalfields estate is an inspiration. Residents are talking to their neighbours, taking charge of their own space and having a pride in it. As well as cheap healthy food, there are physical and mental health benefits from the outdoor activity involved.
This is the way that we must go and it will, finally, as far as I can see, relaunch community in our neighborhoods. The communities of old have been destroyed long ago but community gardens and -allotments might just do that.
We must get back to community in our neighborhoods, real community, and in addition we must grow our food locally. Before the two world wars the City of Paris was able to provide vegetables all year round for its residents from local market gardens that were within the city limits and I am sure that it will be still better if communities will do their own market gardens and allotments, even on hard standings on housing estates.
© 2011
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