[Community_garden] Letter from London: Community Gardeners No Longer Just The "Beardy Weirdy's"

[James Godsil]

This is a letter by Ben Reynolds, organizer of the Growing Food For London
international conference, inspired by visits to Growing Power sites in the
U.S.A. and the Milwaukee International Urban Agriculture Conference, to a
NYT reporter…

Perhaps the people form MoveOn are ready to take notice of our movement,
along with Thomas Friedman and Bill Moyers.  Maybe they will awaken Obama to
this good cause!

Dear Tracie,

Suported by the US Embassy, we recently organised an exchange trip with Will
Allen from Milwaukee, and took a group of parks, and food growing people
from the UK to look at urban agriculture projects in the states. From this
we've produced a report showcasing some of these US projects and how they
compare with the work in the UK, identifying opportunities for moving this
work forward. I attach a PDF of the report - which is also available here:
http://www.sustainweb.org/page.php?id=431

The response to this report has been phenomenal, with interest all across
the world, particularly from the states and Canada, but also Australia,
Europe, and obviously the UK. We're organising a conference on the 30th June
(http://www.sustainweb.org/page.php?id=433), bringing together a line-up of
interenational speakers, and we see it as a follow up to one that was
organised in Milwaukee 2 months ago. Interestingly we've getting a lot of
interest from architects and landscape designers (the conference is part of
the London Festival of Architecture) - which means that the urban food
growing movement is moving beyond just the socially-environmentally aware
folk (beardy-weirdy's we call them here!) and getting out to those who are
drawing up the plans of the future.

This whole issue is really high up the media agenda in the UK at the moment,
with rising fuel prices and rising food prices, many people see urban ag as
part of the solution. We have 10 year waiting lists for some allotment sites
in London, with thousands across the capital waiting for a plot, inspired by
recent TV programmes by people like celebrity chef Jamie Oliver. One of the
largest seed manufacturers in the UK has stated that sales of veg seed have
overtaken flowers seed for the first time.

I'm not sure it will do loads to combat climate change (which is another
motivation here amongst many), but I do think that it's inevitable that we
will see urban ag having a much higher profile in cities in the UK (and
probably beyond) as a way of (particularly low income communities) coping
with higher food prices particularly. But with no land, we're going to have
to think outside the box for growing spaces.
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