The story Imagine waiting at the train station for your commute home, feeling peckish, and simply grabbing a piece of fruit from a tree right off the side of the platform. Implausible? Not in the Lancashire town of Todmorden. For nearly three years the town’s residents, young and old, have been busy taking over car parks, grass verges, graveyards, pavements and schoolyards and turning them into edible landscapes. Few places have made the shift to a local food system more tangible and enjoyable. The efforts are led by a loose coalition of residents who have challenged established notions of what physical changes people can create in the public realm. After an initial ‘guerrilla-gardening’ appropriation of open spaces for food growing, the initiators started approaching both public sector and private landowners for permission to plant on their underused grounds. Examples include Northern Rail, the fire and police stations, the local social housing landlord and a church that has allowed crops to be planted on the graveyard. Since 2009, Incredible Edible Todmorden (IET) has worked with Calderdale Council to make it easier for individuals and groups to plant on council-owned land. In a step with both symbolic and practical value, the council reduced the licence processing fee from £107 to £10 and smoothed other procedures. However, IET does not aim to obtain public funding for its regular planting activities, looking only for collaboration.
and preparation of produce. The local health centre has started an ‘apothecary garden’, and one housing association has launched its own Edible Pennine initiative, offering tenants a free starter pack with seeds and advice. The scheme is a virtuous cycle: the improvements in the physical environment make residents proud of their town, which in turn has generated further support for resident-led public realm initiatives. The market for locally produced food has grown, and Nimbyism has been reduced, as the scheme’s benefits are both tangible and collectively owned. There have been no incidents of garden vandalism, and raised beds adjacent to pubs have been astonishingly free of cigarette butts and glass shards. However, the mission of Incredible Edible Todmorden goes beyond public space alone; rather, the highly visible public realm activities are a way of getting a greater number of people engaged in changing their daily behaviours, in order to grow a movement to build a more sustainable local economy. The organisation therefore also advocates local food production and consumption through initiatives such as the ‘Every Egg Matters’ campaign, food festivals and communal beekeeping. In addition, it has secured funding for a Food Hub, which will also serve as an educational centre.
No formal membership is required to start growing, but Todmorden residents are encouraged to farm wherever and whenever they can. All the town’s schools and several public and private bodies are engaged in the campaign. Schools now grow food in raised beds and polytunnels and involve students in the harvesting Compendium for the Civic Economy
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