Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (14 page)

The yearlong project came to an end when Smith found a £2 bill on the street. He borrowed a friend's truck and used the money to pay the vehicle entrance fee to the New Covent Garden Market, an enormous vegetable and fruit market in southwest London. Smith went around to the vendors’ garbage bins and gleaned unsold and unsellable fruits and vegetables. Back at his squat, he sold his findings and made £5. He then used the profits to return to the market, gleaning more unwanted foods to sell to his squatter community. The next week he bought some whole-grain flour at the market and used it to bake bread in an oven left behind in the squatters’ residence. He also bought other whole foods like rice and dried beans for resale. Alara Wholefoods was born.

Smith and his wife, with whom he founded and still runs the company, moved Alara several times, most recently in 2005 to a patch just near the Eurostar railway tracks in King's Cross north of St. Pancras station. The site cleanup was epic, according to Smith. “Fifty tons of rubbish” had
to be removed. Fencing was installed and terraces dug in for gardens. “If you can imagine the sorts of detritus you'd get in a dark corner within walking distance of a train station,” said Smith, trailing off to let me fill in the imagery. “It was rather insalubrious here,” he finally added.
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That said, clearing the land yielded a few nice surprises. One large pre-Roman building stone was unearthed, as were two large, flat Roman slabs and a Georgian cornerstone. As it turns out, Alara sits on land in King's Cross formerly known as Battle Bridge. This ancient crossing of the Fleet River is where the Romans apparently fought a game-changing battle around 60 CE with the Iceni, a Celtic rebel army led by warrior queen Boudicca that resisted Roman occupation of “Londinium.” The Romans won, and that was the end of the Celtic resistance, though there's now a huge bronze statue of Boudicca in her war chariot with her daughters on the north bank of the Thames near the Parliament Building. There's even a discredited urban legend that persists that Boudicca is said to be buried under Platform 10 at King's Cross train station. As Smith recounted this bit of King's Cross history and smatterings of urban folklore, I scribbled “PR bonanza!” in my notebook and figured marketing companies should be falling over each other with a winery backstory like this. Moreover, I marveled at the fact that this Eden-like garden sprouted on a spot where a millennium of constant human occupation could be traced.

Yet pineapple guava trees thrived. As did pomegranate trees. Blackberry and raspberry canes ran amok. There was also waist-high rosemary, sage, feverfew (a medicinal flowering herb), and comfrey (an important organic fertilizer). There were Asian pear trees, goji berries (also known as wolfberries—red, elongated berries that grow on hedges), asparagus ferns, apricot trees, blueberries, kiwi vines, tomatoes, globe artichokes, pears, gooseberry bushes, broad beans, and French beans. And there was something Smith called a blue bean tree, a perennial bean tree with periwinkle pods. There were over fifty types of edibles growing in this garden adjacent to a warehouse.

It was more than enough for staff lunches, sourced from the garden year-round, Smith explained. Schoolkids also came for programs where they toured the gardens and then picked and prepared lunch in the warehouse kitchen.

In 2009, Smith planted a dozen fruit trees on a neighboring business's boulevard adjacent to the commercial parking lot. In a few years, Booker Wholesale, the discount grocery “cash and carry” will be able to offer a bonus of free tree fruits as an added incentive to shop there.

Finally, we got around to the side of the warehouse where the vineyard was located. I realized that the 2009 article in the
London Evening Standard
that had referred to the vineyard as “London's first large-scale vineyard” was typically hyperbolic in its media pronouncement, but it was an urban vineyard nonetheless—and London's first commercial one in quite some time.
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The vineyard covered a berm that ran 148 feet long and twenty-six feet wide (forty-five meters by eight meters) and had thirty-some Rondo vines—which offer an early-ripening, frost-hardy, and downy mildew-resistant red hybrid grape—that were planted in February of 2009.
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By my visit in early October, the 2010 harvest had already taken place. Although the vines were still very young, Smith said that he'd harvested thirty-five kilograms (seventy-seven pounds) of grapes, which should yield about twenty-five bottles of wine. This was a trial vintage, and the juice was still happily fermenting away at Smith's house. The official commercial vintage would be available in 2011, and he'd employ the expertise of London's Urban Wine Company for the first official commercial harvest, crush, and bottling. Smith already had a buyer for some of the first vintage, which he hoped would be around a hundred bottles. Acorn House Restaurant, near the vineyard, had plans to put Alara's 2011 wine on its wine list.

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ONDON'S
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INE
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Pursuant to this idea of urban grape growing in London, I followed up on Alex Smith's comment about London's Urban Wine Company. Richard Sharp, a South Londoner, came up with the idea for the Urban Wine Company while vacationing in France. He marveled at how entire villages came together during harvest to pick and crush grapes. He had a few vines in his garden at home, as did a number of friends in his borough
of Tooting in south central London. He suggested that they pool their grapes, and the first press was in the fall of 2007. The Urban Wine Company was born. Its first vintage was twenty bottles of Chateau Tooting, Furzedown Blush.
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It is now well known that cities, when they are large enough and sufficiently concretized, create their own microclimate. This is known as the “heat island” effect. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines a heat island as when “built up areas are hotter than nearby rural areas.”
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Furthermore, the EPA notes that the annual mean air temperature of a city with one million people or more can be 1.8-5.4°F (1-3°C) warmer than its surroundings. In the evening, the difference can be as high as 22°F (12°C).
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It was actually in London in the early 1800s that this phenomenon was first described by an amateur meteorologist named Luke Howard and was dubbed the heat island effect. Howard noticed that it was several degrees warmer at night in London than it was in the surrounding farmland areas. Currently London, with its 7.83 million residents in the Greater London area and with a surrounding metropolitan area, supports a population of twelve to fourteen million residents.
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This means that in central London, it is often five degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit) and as much as ten degrees Celsius (eighteen degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than its surrounding rural areas.
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This gives London a growing advantage that can compete with Germany and northern France.
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With all the allotment and backyard gardeners in London, there are a surprising number of grapevines snaking their way throughout the boroughs. In 2010, the Urban Wine Company had one hundred Londoners in its cooperative. The stipulation for membership was a minimum of three kilograms of ripe, healthy grapes, delivered to a collection point on a specified “Harvest Day.” (Earlier-ripening grapes are to be picked when ripe—when the sugar-acid ratio is good—and frozen, if need be.) The grapes are trucked to a winery on the outskirts of London, de-stemmed, crushed, and placed into a fermentation tank for a few months, then
bottled. The harvest resulted in 1,300 bottles of London wine.
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Each cooperative member received six bottles in return. With the minimum requirement of about one ton of grapes to make a separate red or white, the wines so far have been made from the combination of both red and white grapes. But with a harvest of 1.5 tons (3,306 pounds) in 2009, and another 1.5 tons in 2010, it's possible that soon the tonnage will be at levels high enough to produce separate whites, reds, and even sparkling wines. According to Sharp, grape-growing communities across London are blossoming. In May 2010, the Urban Wine Company even planted thirty vines at Eastlea Community School in East London, presumably to nurture the next generation of London vintners.
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Wandering south along Midlands Road after my visit to Alara Vineyard, I came upon King's Cross Skip Garden—fortunately, but quite by accident. The space is essentially a construction brown site that has been turned into a food garden, thanks to some inventive reuse ideas with huge metal construction rubbish bins, or skips.

King's Cross is home to London's largest redevelopment site. Some sixty-seven acres (twenty-seven hectares) are slated for redevelopment by 2020 in the King's Cross Central master redevelopment plan. Construction cranes and job-site fencing were the dominant aesthetic, so food gardens were the last things I expected to find in this mega-construction site. But this, as it turned out, was one of the sites encouraged and supported by Capital Growth, the city-supported green initiative whose goal is to create 2,012 new food-growing sites in London by 2012.
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I peered through the cutouts in the artfully decorated hoarding that wrapped around the Skip Garden long enough that a young, jeans-and-T-shirt-clad man waved me in. Bert Dutka, a twenty-something program animator with Global Generation, had just finished with a class of young schoolchildren who had spent the afternoon at the Skip Garden learning how to grow food in urban spaces even if they don't have access to a garden or allotment.

Skips are mobile industrial construction wastebins used in the United Kingdom, and they are everywhere in this massive construction zone. They are used mainly to contain and remove construction waste from industrial building sites. As it turns out, they also make handy, and portable (if you have access to a crane) food-growing spaces. The Skip Garden was created in the summer of 2009.

Dutka works with Global Generation, a youth-based organization dedicated to empowering youth with the knowledge and skills to effect change toward more sustainable communities. Global Generation maintains the Skip Gardens and runs the educational programs. Dutka said that around four hundred kids a year attend programs at the Skip Garden site.
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They get to see how food plants grow, what they look like, and, moreover, they get hands-on experience with planting, looking after, and harvesting food.

Three skips in the middle of the yard are for annuals: parsnips, broad beans, red and green chard, beets, herbs, corn, with some nasturtiums and other flowers on the borders. One of the skips has a polyethylene-covered half-tunnel, the skip garden's rendition of a greenhouse.

One of the skips along the side of the lot is a portable orchard: five apple trees, two pear trees, two grapevines, raspberry canes, and other soft fruit such as cascading alpine strawberries. The orchard skip is a demonstration of a permanent planting scenario, teaching kids the difference between annual plants, perennials, and permanent plants.