It is a real bonus. This is an incredibly simple amendment. It does not demand money, it demands very little to be done and it would bring an enormous number of benefits. As the amendment says, we are asking councils across the country to publish lists of where there is vacant land within their area that could be suitable for food growing or other kinds of growing. Take a group such as Incredible Edible Todmorden; it has grown both vegetables as well as flowers. It cheers up a neighbourhood but does a great deal more.
This first important thing to say is that we are not asking for allotments. Allotments are completely impossible, as anyone who has ever been involved in any campaign to get rid of an allotment will know. Allotments are there in perpetuity, as it should be, and they cover large areas, and the queues for them are huge. I have a couple of examples: the queue in Camden is 12 years, and in Southampton it is 20 years. More allotments are not going to be created—they need to be on land in the middle of town, which will therefore be seen as prime for building houses—but we can get community growing spaces.
In the belief that any good idea is best told in stories, I will tell your Lordships a few stories. In 2008 I went to work for the then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson—he later became Prime Minister, but that is another matter—as chair of the London Food Board. Not long after I got there, I was approached by a very eager group, which said: “We’ve seen something that was done in Vancouver before the Olympics, where they created edible community gardens. We want to do 2,012 gardens in London by 2012”. “Uh oh”, I thought, “How is that going to happen?” But I thought it was a good project—and, I have to say, so did the mayor.
We undertook the project and in the autumn of 2008 we opened the first garden at the Thrive garden in Battersea. It is a vegetable garden that is primarily used for people who have mental health issues—their doctors prescribe a session at Thrive for them. It is still going. There are many Thrive gardens, and it is extraordinarily important in what it does for people having a traumatic and difficult time.
However, things were very slow. We got hardly any gardens, and we could not figure it out. Councils and hospitals were reluctant; there was space, but what could we do? Then a man from the water board said, “What you need is a meanwhile lease”. That is a very simple thing: it says that you can be there for a few years but can be thrown out. That changed everything. Overnight, it flipped this project from being, quite frankly, hopeless to suddenly being a runner. We would assemble leaders of councils for breakfast, and I would collar them and say, “I want you to do 60 sites”. We would go to the housing associations and ask them to do 10 or 15 sites. Bit by bit, over years 2 and 3, we suddenly started to have this explosion of gardens.
Today, we have 2,500 gardens. We opened the 2,012th at St Charles Hospital in the north of Ladbroke Grove in the winter of 2012—it is a fantastic garden and is still going. I remember some of the objections. Most of these gardens did not have fences and it was said that people would steal from them. Weirdly, no one ever stole. In fact, we opened a garden outside City
Hall, by Tower Bridge. We got the patch of land, and someone called the Phantom Guerrilla Gardener would come by and plant extra plants—it was all very mysterious but wonderful.
We had a garden in King’s Cross, which, following on from what the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, said, was on contaminated land. Some genius came up with the idea that we could have a garden in a skip, and furthermore that the skip could move. We had three skips on one of those sites just behind the station—sites which are now unrecognisably beautiful and modern. We had three gardens, which you climbed up to; they were used by schools on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Then the building developers wanted the site back, so they picked up the skips and moved them to another site, with the gardens. We did that three times before it was finally filled in.
We had gardens that were in the middle of tower blocks. When the designers in the 1950s put up those pretty terrifying concrete blocks, they left areas in the middle. We saw photographs of people walking, pushing children in their prams and walking dogs, but nowadays they are completely terrifying, because they are full of old needles and dog poo, rather than nice dogs on leads. People did not want to come down from the tower blocks and go there. But put a garden in, and something magical happens. People became protective of it and felt they could come downstairs and join in.
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Every garden developed differently, with different people leading them, people deciding to have weddings or barbecues in them, and schoolchildren getting involved and selling things. We had several gardens that helped supply herbs to Indian restaurants. There were a million different outcomes, and it cost very little money. We even had lots of wonderful deals with local builders, who would give us cracked scaffolding planks; they were unsafe for scaffolding but brilliant for raised beds. We also had gardens on rooftops and in a Tube station. A brilliant teacher in Brixton started a garden in which the school got involved; it became so intrinsic to what they did and how they ate that they extended out into the community—every Friday, old-age pensioners would come and have a free lunch and sit in the garden.
There were extraordinary benefits, which came from different places. For instance, the police said that a garden in the middle of an area with many high-rises was one of the best community watch places. I have seen people leaning off the 16th floor, shouting at someone attempting to molest the garden, “Oi! Get off it—it’s ours”.
A survey commissioned by City, University of London said that the best route back to work for the unemployed was community gardening: you must have patience and fortitude for growing and you have to talk to people —everything magical that you could do. We also found that it helped marginalised children: we had another brilliant school, where there were 37 languages, and they were being taught that if 12 beans create six rows, how do you work that out.
It is extremely difficult to find any downsides to this project when it gets going. There are downsides when people cannot find anywhere to grow, and the appetite is huge. We had 200 acres of London under cultivation
by the end of it; we are sequestering 4,529 kilos of carbon; we are growing over 40 tonnes of food, which is valued at over £300,000; and there is a fabulously efficient little website, which I tried to turn into a national project before the COP—so far, I have failed, but watch this space.
The point is that this is an easy amendment that would not cost anyone anything and would bring an extraordinary benefit. I see no reason why the Government —especially a Conservative Government who, at the end of the day, like things to do with communities and plants and growing—should not welcome it with open arms.