Hackney Right To Grow

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Category: Pam Warhurst

  • What if we had the Right to Grow?

    What if we had the 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. Community groups like Incredible Edible have shown that with a little imagination, bravery and TLC these parcels of land can be turned into oases for food and wildlife.

    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 and red-tape so often encountered by those who want to get on and grow food with and for their community. The Right to Grow calls for a new relationship that builds trust between councils and communities, and sees authorities recognise the immense value that community food growers bring to the places we call home. With special thanks to University of Sheffield and Research England for funding the production of this film.

    🌱 Find out more about the Right to Grow: https://www.incredibleedible.org.uk/w…

    🌱 Report: Benefits of the Right to Grow: https://www.incredibleedible.org.uk/w…

    🌱 Council briefing on the Right to Grow: https://www.incredibleedible.org.uk/w…

    🌱 How Right to Grow supports existing council policies: https://www.incredibleedible.org.uk/w…

    🌱 Join the Right to Grow mailing list and Learning Network: https://mailchi.mp/incredibleedible/n…

  • ‘The system is the problem, not people’

    ‘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.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/sep/13/radical-food-group-incredible-edible-guerrilla-gardening