Joe Holyoak News Blog

Much as, generally, I admire and extol the personalisation of space and the untidy, anarchic visual order that usually results, I have never really felt enthusiastic about allotments, nor indeed about the growing of vegetables at all. My father was a keen gardener, so perhaps it is a reaction against him, for I always wanted to be unlike him; I still can’t listen to Gardeners’ Question Time. I enjoy their scenographic aspect, as we pass by on the railway embankment, like Philip Larkin in The Whitsun Weddings, and the allotments below reveal their patchwork of human and horticultural diversity. I enjoy David Crouch and Colin Ward’s book on allotments, and its celebration of cooperative individualism.[i] I am pleased that Birmingham, where I live, has the distinctions of both the greatest provision of allotments in the country, and the country’s oldest surviving allotments (Guinea Gardens in Edgbaston, albeit with its tenants seemingly having to continually fend off threats to its survival).

But perhaps I need to get more engaged, because allotments may be one of the motifs of our urban future. The ways in which we produce and consume food constitute one of the most disfunctional features of our modern life, and have been thoroughly documented in recent years. Where to begin listing the interlocking problems? Many people have become alienated from the origins of their food, have no knowledge of how to cook food, and do not know the dinner table as a constituent part of family life. Bad nutrition contributes to illhealth and growing levels of obesity among both adults and children. The market dominance of Tesco and other supermarkets forces small shops out of business and damages local economies. Their centralised distribution patterns put thousands of lorries on to our crowded roads, which also contain their customers driving to and from their car parks. The huge food miles figures which result reduce the freshness of food. The supermarkets’ use of imports to obtain year-round availability of food helps to disconnect us from awareness of seasonal change, and their emphasis on uniformity and standardisation reduces local variety and local distinctiveness. In short, there is hardly a quality of our lives which remains unaffected by our damaged relationship with food.

An innovative study of the availability of fresh and affordable fruit and vegetables in Sandwell, one of the most deprived boroughs in the country, was carried out by the local PCT and Warwick University in 2000.[ii] Using GIS mapping, residential streets which were within ‘reasonable walking distance’ (500 metres) of a shop selling at least eight different kinds of fresh and reasonably priced fruit and vegetables were identified. The results were very worrying in what they indicated of the connections between poor health, deprivation, and unhealthy eating patterns. There are large residential areas where no shops selling fresh fruit or vegetables exist. Inexpensive, good quality food is available only in small, concentrated shopping areas to which the majority of residents have to drive or go by bus. Small retailers selling healthy food struggle to survive against competition from larger stores, and against crime and harsh working conditions. It is a graphic illustration of the pathological situation that Joanna Blythman has documented in her various books on the British people and their food.[iii] Yet Sandwell, like similar post-industrial areas, has extensive areas of leftover brownfield land in no productive use which could, without great infrastructural investment, be producing food for local consumption.

In addition to these issues of health and food miles and so on, there are the global economic facts of food shortage, and the huge increases in basic food prices, and what they mean for our national economies. In Britain, we produce only about 40% of the food which we eat, and the government and many authorities maintain that this proportion needs to be considerably increased if we are to gain a necessary degree of economic autonomy. But where do we see the influence of all these factors on urban planning and urban design? We have eventually shut the stable door of the out-of-town supermarket, but the supermarkets’ dominance nevertheless increases yearly. If we are to increase our productivity, eat more healthily, re-establish a relationship with real food, reduce food poverty, reduce imports and food miles, and allow food to contribute more to local culture and identity, then it seems there has to be a process of localisation, which will make our towns and cities very different from the way they are at present. Localisation will, among other things, necessitate the urbanisation of food production, whether in the form of allotments or in other ways. Food production will not be confined to the countryside.

Here we encounter a problem with the orthodoxy of urban design, as expressed in PPS1, the Urban White Paper, and other manifestos. Central to these is the principle of intensification. In reaction against the low density spreading of towns, the exporting to greenfield sites of business parks, and the blurring of distinctions between urban and rural, that typified the period of late modernism in the twentieth century, orthodoxy now requires the concentration of development in towns and cities, and the raising of urban residential densities. (Which is not to say that these are necessarily  everywhere either fully supported or being achieved, only that this is the party line). In a more general sense, as well as the justification of these measures by the sustainability agenda, there is also a renewal and a celebration of the culture of urban compression, intensity and diversity. Town and country are to be made more expressive by their opposition. As I write this, I think of the current development of Upton, on the western boundary of Northampton, where an urban edge of four storey terraced houses addresses the countryside; an opposition almost unheard of in England, and more evocative of a European bastide town.

As a consequence, there is now (or at least there was recently, until the collapse in economic confidence, which presumably will return to where it was, at some time) considerable development pressure on open spaces, both formal and informal, in towns. In Birmingham there is a waiting list for allotments, but a few years ago it took considerable local opposition to reduce, but not eliminate, the encroachment on to the Victoria Jubilee Allotments in Handsworth by the housebuilders Westbury Homes (later Charles Church) to build houses for sale. So, if we are to make our towns more sustainable by building more densely, how are we also to make them more sustainable by having open spaces for growing food? This is the conundrum.

In the past, the pre-industrial town accommodated food growing by being a patchwork of buildings and small gardens. The intensity of land use was often encouraged, or enforced, by the defensive walled form of the town, wherein the town had to be capable of autonomy in a crisis. Similarly, the time of maximum food production in Britain was the Second World War, when the country was cut off from foreign sources of food, and many urban recreational spaces were turned over to intensive horticulture. Presently, one of the most impressive models for urban agriculture is Havana in Cuba. Because of the American ban on trade, and then the disappearance of its Soviet Union supplies, Havana is now obliged to augment its rural production by growing in the city. The urban fabric is interspersed with many small productive gardens, called by the Cubans organoponicos, creating an environment that is not only considerably sustainable, but also a sensory and physical delight.

The example of Havana makes the point that spaces for productive growing and spaces for recreation are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Recreational space does not only have to be ecologically degree-zero football pitches. Among the leading promoters of this idea are the architects Katrin Bohn and Andre Viljoen. Viljoen has edited a book which contains a number of demonstration urban agriculture projects for London, the largest being a continuous green corridor, called LeisurEscape, accommodating both growing and recreational spaces, connecting Tate Modern, on the banks of the Thames, to East Croydon.[iv] Although an isolated project, Bohn and Viljoen’s proposal is reminiscent of earlier, more visionary projects that introduced the greening of the city, such as the 1938 MARS plan for London, with its wedges of open space penetrating deep into the urban fabric. This in turn has its roots in Ebenezer Howard’s proposal for the third of the Three Magnets; an alternative settlement form that represented “the marriage of town and country”. This of course, both in its theoretical form and in the built form of Letchworth, was low density development. So was Bournville, where George Cadbury provided every household with a fruit tree in its garden, and the garden was large enough to grow vegetables to feed the family.

These are delightful places to live, but their low density makes them incompatible with today’s orthodoxy of sustainable development. How are we to square the circle of having both more buildings and more gardens within the same urban area? One obvious answer is contained within the generally discredited urbanist ideology of Le Corbusier in his “Five Points for a New Architecture”; to replace the open space lost by the construction of a building, on its roof. A couple of years ago there was a very enterprising proposal for a new Asda supermarket in Birmingham, designed by the architects Gardner Stewart, but not yet built. The large single-storey footprint is sandwiched between a basement car park below, and another car park above. On the roof is a park, accessible by steps from the higher ground level on one side, and at the edges of the park stand six storeys of flats. The park is for recreational use, but I have often thought that supermarkets could at least help to redeem their negative role within society by growing food on the roof, and then selling it minutes later within the store. A roof could be covered in a huge greenhouse, growing all the tomatoes that the district could want. Or there could be thousands of free-range hens running about and laying eggs, to be boxed on the roof, and the boxes slid down ramps directly on to the shelves below. What could be fresher? The multi-storey urban farm designed by the architects MVRDV as the Dutch Pavilion for the 2000 Expo provided, as Expo projects historically have done, an extreme version of an idea that is capable of domestication, and translation into a more normative form.

Rooftop gardens would require additional structure, and for a single-storey supermarket or similar building the additional cost would be considerable and perhaps prohibitive. But for the three-layer Birmingham Asda the smaller proportionate cost presumably made the park economically viable. Green roofs are now quite common and affordable, with both thermal and environmental benefits; it is only a relatively small further step for a roof to become a productive garden. Even less space-consuming are vertically planted surfaces. These have inherent problems of access and irrigation, but there are being developed new conventional methods for overcoming these. Amazon currently lists eleven books on vertical gardening.

Buildings covered in plants, whether horizontally or vertically, or both, conventionally represent a romantic and perhaps eccentric eco-vision of the future; a reversion to timeless peasant ways in opposition to the supposedly rational twentieth-century high technology vision. But perhaps the hard physical, social and economic circumstances of the twenty-first century mean that the romantic image of a goat on the roof, sitting shaded by the runner beans from England’s Mediterranean sunshine, is the necessary reality of the future. 

[i] David Crouch and Colin Ward, The Allotment: its Landscape and Culture, Five Leaves, 1997.

[ii] Dowler, E., Rex, D., Blair, A., Donkin, A., and Grundy, C., Measuring Access to Healthy Food in Sandwell, University of Warwick and Sandwell Health Action Zone, 2001.

[iii] Joanna Blythman, Bad Food Britain, Fourth Estate, 2006.

[iv] Andre Viljoen, CPULs: Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes. Designing urban agriculture for sustainable cities, Elsevier, 2005.