Author: admin
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Support our Right to Grow neighbours in Waltham Forest!
We are a group of local food growers who have been working for years to build this alternative in our corner of North-East London. This campaign represents a turning point in our work. And we need you to be a part of it!
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Southwark Council allows ‘right to grow’ on unused council land in London first
Southwark’s decision is a recognition of the significant role urban food growing plays in providing habitat for nature, improving wellbeing and social connections and improving access to fresh fruit and veg in a cost-of-living crisis. It’s a bold step forward and reflects Southwark council’s commitment to future-proofing resident’s access to land.
What is the Right to Grow?
The Right to Grow is a piece of legislation developed by Incredible Edible that is being made available to councils to adopt and adapt to their local circumstances.
The Right to Grow requires local authorities to maintain a free, accessible map of all public land that is suitable for community cultivation or wildlife projects. And to make it straight-forward for community groups to secure free leases and allow those groups to bid for the land should the authority decide to sell it.
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RIGHT TO GROW FOOD ON PUBLIC LAND HELPS LOCAL AUTHORITIES MEET GOALS ON HEALTH, SUSTAINABILITY, FOOD PROVISION AND MORE.
With 78% of people believing that substantial or radical changes are needed to fix the food system, community food growing offers a practical, scaleable grassroots solution which local authorities can have a direct hand in supporting and developing.
Embracing and encouraging community growing will, through adoption of a Right to Grow on public land, offer a multitude of benefits from food provision, health improvements and social cohesion to improved biodiversity and reduced carbon emissions.
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Welcome to Hackney Right To Grow
Hackney Right to Grow is a coalition of local growers and food, climate and community activists, campaigning for residents in the London Borough of Hackney to have the right to grow food on public land across the borough.
Our Right to Grow. Up and down the country public land is being left unloved, costing our local authorities money to care for, and giving nothing back to the community in return. Incredible Edible growers have shown that with a little TLC these parcels of land can be turned into oases for food and wildlife.
Red tape and complex leases often stop communities from making good use of public land, not to mention the fact that it can be incredibly hard to find out where exactly this unloved public land is.
It’s time we were afforded a Right to Grow; an opportunity to take up our seed packets, spades and watering cans, and nourish our communities, without all the hoop-jumping.
A Right to Grow would require local authorities to maintain a free, accessible map of all public land that is suitable for community cultivation or wildlife projects. They would also need to make it straight-forward for community groups to secure free leases to cultivate the land, and allow those groups to bid for the land should the authority decide to sell it.
The Right to Grow is gathering political traction and received broad support in a debate in the House of Lords. It is also gathering traction at local levels, with Hull passing a Right to Grow motion, and several other local authorities looking into how they could implement a Right to Grow.
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‘The system is the problem, not people’
This article in the Guardian, by Pam Warhurst, is so good I want to copy it all, but won’t, but do read it! This is transformative stuff, in a world where it seems hard to see where we can achieve change at the grassroots, Pam shows how!
“‘The system is the problem, not people’: how a radical food group spread round the world … Incredible Edible’s guerrilla gardening movement encourages people to take food-growing – and more – into their own hands”
“What is the solution? Incredible Edible is calling for a “right to grow”, which would make permission to plant on public land automatic, and create obligations for local authorities to facilitate it. In that is the kernel of a much bigger idea – one that goes beyond food.
“This is saying: look, in a time of crisis, [at] what we, the people, can do, and how we can use land differently to get better outcomes,” Warhurst says. “You could theoretically apply it to energy, you could theoretically apply it to housing, you could theoretically apply it to a lot of things, but I’m only doing food.”
What this is about, she says, is nothing less than “a new relationship between the citizen and the state”. Incredible Edible has already demonstrated it can make a material difference to people’s lives.
“We’re repurposing people power and we’re repurposing land, and that’s the bottom line,” she says. “We’ve got oodles of both of them … just respect people and create frameworks that allow them to just crack on and do these things instead of having to fight the system all the time.”And with that, Warhurst says, there is hope for the future.
“God knows I wish that we weren’t in the state we are in as a planet, and I wish we weren’t in the state we’re in as a nation. But we are where we are and there’s no point having a moan about it – you’ve got to roll up your sleeves and do something.”
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‘Better than medication’: prescribing nature works, project shows
One of the great things about Community Food Growing is it does not just grow food but it helps people grow too. And while I am sure that “nature walks … tree planting and wild swimming” all give great benefits I suspect that Community Food Growing, as illustrated in the photo the Guardian has used, has the deepest and longest benefits.
As a lecturer at Capel Manor and at Organic Lea, students often had to fill in ‘wellness’ forms at the beginning, during and at the end of the term to see how they were feeling. It was for them to see how they were doing, mentally, while on the course and also related to funding. And of course I asked students too how they were feeling through the courses I taught, and both those forms and the responses to me from students show how helpful and sometimes even transformative being involved with food growing is for most people. And the funders could see their funding was working!
And growing food has a deep affect on people.It’s the whole seed to plate thing, the nuturing from planting a seed, watching it grow, protecting it, watering and feeding it, then harvesting and eating it, often with others people, communally. That’s something above and beyond what “nature walks … tree planting and wild swimming” give, though they themselves have special elements to them.
And as the article also notes, and the hard nosed bean counter should spot immediately, social prescribing saves money! The NHS and local councils will save significant sums of money if they invest in social prescribing AND specifically in setting up and supporting Community Food Growing projects as part of that.
Community Food Growing is a Win Win! People get better mental and physical health and of course healthy free food and councils and other local and national institutions save significant sums of money.
It’s odd we’re still in the pilot project stage with social prescribing, and council support for food growing remains minimal, but I can see both exploding in the next few years.
So, which council leaders and officers are going to make a name for themselves leading on this?
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Local Policies and Their Role in Community Food Growing
There’s an increasing amount of research showing the great potential of urban food growing. Even though urban food growing was historically crucial to all cities, urban food growing in the UK reduced significantly in the 1960s. Allotments declined from c700,000 in the 1960s to c250,000 by 2000 due to both a lack of demand but also councils taking allotments for development. The late 1960s Thorpe Report into allotments concluded that councils should provide “a minimum of 15 full size plots … per 1,000 households” My local area, Hackney, has 100,000 households so should then provide 1500 allotments yet it only provides 133!
Hackney Council have though created quite a few plots on council estates in recent years. There was a parallel change in how people gardened with a large decline in ‘grow your own’ as fresh food became easier to buy at supermarkets.
But we are now confronted by a series of crises that make urban food growing not desirable but a neccessity: climate change and global warming leading to significant problems for agriculture but also significantly caused by modern agricultural practice, mass species extinction globally and massive declines in biodiversity in the UK and again significantly caused by agriculture and food demand in the developed world, food poverty in the UK, health crises due to bad diets, and war and the potential of further wars to disrupt food trade. And urban food growing all helps remedy these crises.
The joint University of Lancaster, Liverpool and Cranfield study in 2021/22 “Potential of urban green spaces for supporting horticultural production: a national scale analysis” follows that of The University of Sheffield in 2020 which concluded “Growing fruit and vegetables in just 10 per cent of a city’s gardens and other urban green spaces could provide 15 per cent of the local population with their ‘five a day’, according to new research.”
The Lancaster et al study stated “Our analysis suggests that urban green space at the GB level has the capacity to support production of nationally significant volumes of FF&V, helping to re-orient food systems to produce more food locally, increase food sovereignty and support food system resilience” and that
“We found that urban green spaces are substantially underutilized for urban food production … The presence of publicly held land within the urban green space network in the form of amenity gardens managed by local councils could play a crucial role in building knowledge and social capacity for UA.”
These studies show urban food growing works for everybody but that we need councils to start giving significant support to make that happen.
