Communal action to improve sustainability - Bankside Open Spaces Trust (BOST), London

In an underprivileged area of high-density, relatively run-down social housing near Waterloo Station, Bankside Open Spaces Trust (BOST) works with the local community to create the 'Diversity Garden' communal vegitable gardens.

London's green resource

London contains around 93,440 acres of decking, paving, lawn, herbaceous borders and weeds.

More commonly known as "gardens", they are attached to almost half of the capital’s 3.1 million homes. Innumerable areas of green space are also attached to estates and tower blocks around the city.

A well-cultivated acre of land, carefully tended for 40 hours per week, can yield sufficient fruit and vegetables to feed 50 people for a year. Dedicated mathematicians can do the exact calculations, but the top line is we have a huge urban resource of land which could be used to provide good quality food for large numbers of people at low cost.

Pun intended, there’s a growing band of individuals, organisations and community groups who are turning this promise into reality in all kinds of innovative self-help, mutually supportive ways which – once the produce is harvested – can lead on to trading, bartering and (in some cases) the creation of local garden currencies.

Growing together

BOST provides safe plots for communal vegetable growing, in a setting which also incorporates ponds for wildlife, a seaside-style gravel garden, and specially planted cherry, maple and alder trees. It enables BOST to run gardening groups for families, local schools, minority groups and anyone with an interest in growing plants and produce.

Over the past eight years, BOST has worked with dozens of different resident groups, and numerous local schools, to develop a green vision for Southwark and Lambeth. It provides the knowledge, the expertise, the support, the advice and the training which empowers individuals and communities to develop skills and productive growing spaces – from shared areas to vegetable growing on tower block balconies.

In absolute terms of food output, what BOST and the communities with which it works produce is hardly feeding the 5,000, but it’s certainly feeding the future. Rhianna, a nine-year-old girl from a local primary school, worked with classmates in a BOST-promoted after-school gardening club to grow vegetables from seed to harvest in the Diversity Garden. She said, "Our home-grown potatoes were the best, and tasting the chillies that we have grown is like tasting the sun.”

A sustainable future

The impact of climate change on transport, distribution, and the cost and availability of foodstuffs is already being felt. A “dig for victory” attitude is developing, but not in a dour, dogged, wartime kind of way. BOST is one of a myriad of organisations which are re-connecting people with the realities of food production and consumption, in their own backyards.

Above all, it’s seeding a new belief in the power of communal action, which is a critical development, because arguably in the new world order, it’s small-scale, neighbourhood organisations which will be best placed to promote sustainability and self-sufficiency.