Hackney Right To Grow

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  • Identify more sites to help London feed itself

    Identify more sites to help London feed itself

    With 99 per cent of the food and drinks consumed in London being brought in from outside the capital, the Mayor must undertake a London-wide review of food growing sites and identify new land for food growing.

    The London Assembly Environment Committee has published its report – London: A Growing City? – which outlines the key barriers to food growing in London, and what the Mayor can do to increase community food growing.

    Key recommendations in the Committee report include:

    • The Mayor should work with boroughs to undertake a London-wide review of food growing sites across the capital and identify opportunities for making new land available for Londoners to grow food, including new allotments, community farms and orchards.
       
    • Ahead of the 2026-27 budget, the Mayor should set out the steps he intends to take to make London’s food system more resilient by end of this Mayoral term. This should include supporting the Right to Grow campaign.
       
    • The Mayor should convene stakeholders across London to agree actions to reduce barriers for ‘Black, Brown, and minority-led’ food growing projects.
  • FOOD IN OUR HANDS – March with the Land Workers Alliance

    FOOD IN OUR HANDS – March with the Land Workers Alliance

    When: Saturday April 26th – Food and speeches from 12pm

    Where: Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, London, SE11 5HL

    March with the Land Workers Alliance to put Food in Or Hands!
    On April 26th 2025, we’ll be bringing together farmers, growers, food system workers, activists and everyone who has a stake in the UK’s food system (yes – that includes you!) to march in London under the banner ‘Food In Our Hands’.

    There’s a lot to be angry right now; from Defra’s abrupt closure of the SFI scheme and the ongoing struggle of food producers to make a decent living, to rising inequality and continued attempts by the far-right to hijack UK farming.

    It’s now more important than ever for us to come together and build a broad and progressive coalition across the UK’s food, farming and land working sectors, and present our vision for a more just and equitable future.

    Find Out More
  • A year of The Right to Grow in Hull

    A year of The Right to Grow in Hull

    Date and time

    Wednesday, April 9 · 4 – 5pm GMT+1

    Register

    At the end of 2023, Hull announced it would implement a Right to Grow policy, to support communities in accessing public land for food and nature projects. 

    That was the easy part! What followed was a year of working through a detailed process to decide exactly how the policy would be implemented, and how it would work in practice. 

    The whole process was followed closely by researchers at the University of Leeds. In this session we’ll hear the learnings and observations from that research, as well as hear from the officer who will be working with the community in Hull to bring the Right to Grow to life!

    There will be time for discussion and questions at the end.

    Who should join the webinar?

    🌱 Anyone working towards the adoption of a Right to Grow in their area

    🌱 Anyone with an interest in policy change to support community land access

    🌱 Anyone who believes we need more community food and nature spaces in our urban spaces!

    Our Speakers

    Rebecca St. Claire – Lecturer in Sustainable Food Systems at University of Leeds

    Claire Gribben – PhD researcher and teaching fellow on Sustainable Cities and Sustainable Food Systems at Unviersity of Leeds

    Jane Winter – Open Space Community Engagement Officer at Hull City Council

  • Right to Grow: London Learning Network

    Right to Grow: London Learning Network

    Date and time

    Tuesday, April 8 · 3 – 4pm GMT+1

    Register

    Join London’s Right to Grow Learning Network for a talk on why civil food resilience matters and how it can be applied to London’s food system. This session will feature Professor Tim Lang, one of the UK’s leading voices on food policy and resilience.

    The UK government assures us that our food security is robust. But is it really? Climate change, geopolitics, food price volatility, and fragile supply chains paint a different picture—one where resilience is key.

    Why Attend?

    • 🌱 Understand the Risks: How vulnerable is the UK’s food system? What role does policy play? 
    • 🌍 Explore Solutions: Can the Right to Grow movement contribute to national food resilience? 
    • 🗣 Engage & Discuss: Have your say on how communities should be involved in shaping food security.

    Professor Lang will share insights from his latest research, including a report for the National Preparedness Commission on public food resilience. He’ll explore: 

    • ✅ The politics of food security 
    • ✅ The UK’s reliance on imported food & just-in-time supply chains
    • ✅ The government’s Resilience Framework (and its surprising gaps) 
    • ✅ Whether citizens should be involved in food resilience planning—or if supermarkets should have all the power

    What to Expect

    🎤 Talk by Professor Tim Lang (Professor Emeritus of Food Policy, City University of London) 

    🤝 Q&A & Discussion on the Right to Grow, food security, and resilience 

    🌿 Networking & Action-Building with growers, campaigners & policy experts

    Whether you’re a food grower, policymaker, activist, or simply someone who cares about the future of food, this event is for you. Let’s build a movement where everyone has the right to grow and shape a resilient, sustainable food system for London and beyond.

    Who Should Attend?

    This event is open to anyone age 18+ from London who’s interested in food growing, sustainability, activism, and urban futures. Whether you’re a resident, part of a local authority, a community leader, or a policymaker, your voice is important!

    After our speakers’ presentations, there will be time for questions and discussion, and the session will be recorded.

    Meet your hosts:

    Incredible Edible – a grassroots movement that encourages people to grow their own food and share it with others. The movement began in 2007 in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, UK.

    Sustain – is a powerful alliance of organisations and communities working together for a better system of food and farming, and cultivating the movement for change.

    Nowadays – a social enterprise fighting for urban nature. Nowadays provide resources, educational content, programmes, workshops, and cybergardening tools to make nature and gardening accessible to everyone.

  • Welcome to Hackney Right To Grow

    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.

  • ‘Better than medication’: prescribing nature works, project shows

    ‘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?

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/sep/04/better-than-medication-prescribing-nature-works-project-shows