The Mayor of London’s plan for London, recently promulgated after about half a year’s worth of input and commentary as a replacement for the 2008 plan, includes an interesting new project which has potential to significantly change the way consumption in London works. The plan provides in Ch. 7, policy number 7.22, that a strategy be developed to create a significant new use of ‘land for food’ directly in the London area, in particular in its ‘Green Belt’. By 2012, there will be over 2000 new plots for food creation within the domain of the Mayor, including by means of financial support. The practical side of this is to be undertaken by a campaign called ‘Capital Growth’ which provides grants and training to people seeking to develop food plots within and around London, supported also by the money from the Big Lottery. As of now, only 8% of the London area is actually used as vegetable garden or farmland, which compares to 81% for the whole of England.(1) This is not for lack of interest, since waiting lists for allotments to grow fruit and veg in the city are immense in virtually every borough.
The interesting fact is that although Britain compared to continental Europe has quite a lead in locally sourced food, organic production (competing with Germany) and an interest in the qualitative aspects of food production, London itself has seen very little of this. During the Middle Ages, London was relatively well able to keep itself supplied with food compared to for example the major cities of northern Italy, which suffered regular famine as a result of interruption of supplies by wars and economic changes. The latter would even war with each other over control of grain supplying ports, while London was safely ensconced in the middle of the highly productive areas of East Anglia and suffered from no urban competitor of size anywhere nearby.(2) Even as late as before World War I large amounts of London’s food consumption came from the ring of garden land surrounding the city, which provided borough markets with food for the general public, manured by the many horses London was home to. The disappearance of such production as a result of the shift to industrial mass production of food and the rise of the supermarket is no laughing matter: it is estimated by the World Wildlife Fund that the largest single component in the British ‘carbon footprint’ is food production and transport, accounting for as much as 23% of the total.(3) Clearly, it’s time for a rethinking of our food distribution systems, all the more with the looming threat of global warming and the ever increasing costs, financial and environmental, of our current system of mass production of food.
It is not clear whether the Food for London initiative will achieve its other goal of promoting agricultural biodiversity, in particular because of Capital Growth’s reliance on mass producers of standard seeds for its allotment support schemes. Nonetheless, the fact that a rethinking of the capital’s food production in favor of smaller, local plots managed in an environmentally friendly way by local people is supported by such opposite figures in politics as Boris Johnson and Gordon Brown should be a definite indication for skeptics that this is more than just another pie-in-the-sky green experiment. Serious designs have been made already for so-called ‘vertical farms’, which allow the often limited allotment space for agriculture in cities to be used in a manner that is capable of producing the food quantities a true metropolis like London needs. Cuba, whose sustainable but low-intensity agriculture has come under severe pressure since the Soviet subsidy tap has been shut, has already switched to such schemes in its capital Havana.(4) As ecological and economic crisis piles upon crisis, food prices keep increasing, and over time this will affect not just the Third World but also the somewhat better-filled wallet of the Londoner. Not just Cuba, but also countries like China and Argentina are seeing the revival of urban agriculture as a serious proposal for the environmental and economic pressures on the unsustainable 20th century style production.
While radical proposals such as feeding the entire influx of people for the Olympics by such agriculture are likely too much to ask in the short run, the Mayor’s proposals deserve the enthousiasm and support of the London population. Food will be cheaper for the less well-off, while all layers of the population can be satisfied with a smaller carbon footprint and hopefully even a more diverse range of local foodstuffs. It might even help boost the reinvention of ‘traditional British food’ in its new gastronomic approach. Finally, in the longer run it might allow entire boroughs to be fed from less intensive, environmentally sustainable and even fair trade-oriented agriculture. This is done for example in Hackney by the ‘Growing Communities’ project, albeit still on a smaller scale, which employs 20 people and feeds 1500 per week.(5) A visionary, London-wide application of the same ideas could be a revolution in food that will have Londoners hungry for more.
1) Capital Growth, http://www.capitalgrowth.org/.
2) Derek Keene, “Feeding Medieval European Cities, 600-1500″. http://www.history.ac.uk/resources/e-seminars/keene-paper
3) Kate Burt, “The urban farmer: One man’s crusade to plough up the inner city”. The Independent (1 June 2008).
4) Graham Harvey, “Farming: vertically challenged?”. The Guardian (30 June 2008).
5) http://www.redpepper.org.uk/Feeding-the-city
