Food Stories and Lessons from Lambeth

By Rhys Jones, Joana Ferro and Samuel Perry

Rhys Jones is a co-founder of HLC and Consultant Landscape Architect at LUC. He is also currently studying MSc Environment & Sustainable Development at UCL.

Joana Ferro is a Landscape Architect and experienced urban designer, and has a Master’s degree in architecture from the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She has an interest in understanding the way people live, and works towards designing and shaping inclusive, equitable and environmentally sustainable cities.

Samuel Perry studied Landscape Architecture at Kingston University and is a Freelance Landscape Architect. He is also a member of the Landscape Institute’s Diversity & Inclusion Working Group.

The Autumn 2019 edition of the journal introduced the work of the Humanitarian Landscape Collective. Here is an update on their work on food security from the past year.

In November 2019, just before the pandemic struck, The Trussell Trust reported that between 8-10% of households in the UK were described as “food insecure” (1) , and that Trussell’s network of food banks had seen the number of emergency food parcels provided to people in crisis increase by73% over the previous 5 years (2) .

It’s hard to draw comparisons between pre- and post-lockdown figures, but it is estimated that food insecurity amongst adults quadrupled during the first lockdown due to a combination of food shortages in shops, a loss of income or a need to self-isolate (3) . The pandemic has made it very clear how unequal, unsustainable and fragile certain aspects of our food system are, mostly affecting groups such as the elderly, BAME households, and disabled people (4) .

The Humanitarian Landscape Collective is a network of like-minded built environment professionals, academics and NGOs who want to use our skills to address society’s greatest challenges. We saw the crisis at home as being too big to ignore, so we reached out to local charities and community groups to understand the extent of the emergency response and how to address the crisis. Some of our network were based in the Lambeth area, so we linked up with the Lambeth Mutual Aid Group, a collective of individuals and organisations who came together during the pandemic to support their neighbourhood’s vulnerable members. Through their virtual meetings, we heard the stories and realities of grassroots organisations and community groups battling to feed their vulnerable neighbours with little to no government support. We learnt that food banks were facing an unprecedented surge in demand, and the concerning gap between their supply and demand mobilised us to address the food shortfall. We reached out to community gardens, allotments, and city farms across London to source surplus fresh produce, but they all had the same answer: “…you’re too late, we’ve already harvested everything.” It turned out that the pandemic coincided with the ‘Hungry Gap’, a period between harvesting the winter crops and sowing new crops in the spring.

Although there was no surplus produce to be found, our efforts did yield an idea from one allotment owner: to make the most of the Clap for Carers movement on Thursdays to encourage food bank donations. Organised through neighbourhood WhatsApp and Facebook groups, neighbours were asked to leave one item of food on their doorstep and nominate someone to collect and later drop off the donations at their local food bank. We named this the Food Share Initiative and spread the word as far as we could, picking up interest from as far as Manchester and Gloucestershire, with our Facebook profile recording 15,000 views in just two days. Recording the impact at this initial stage was challenging, but we asked people to take photographs of their donations as they scurried up and down their streets at 8:05pm picking up tins and packets of food to donate. Although food banks have a purpose in catering to immediate food shortages, they are, however, not a long-term answer to food insecurity. If we want to push for a more equitable and environmentally sustainable food system, we will need to address the issues through all levels of society. For example, food and agriculture charity Sustain is advocating for policy change at the national level, and grassroots organisations are striving to provide better access to healthy food for vulnerable people in their localities. Forming partnerships with this sector could help us to understand the food security realities on the ground, an essential first step to understand how landscape architects can help build and improve the UK’s food security future. It is through this logic that we decided to partner with Jojo Sureh, the founder of Cook to Care, an emergency food relief service born out of the pandemic which prepares and delivers nutritious food parcels to vulnerable families and individuals shielding or lacking access to healthy affordable food. Cook to Care began by preparing and delivering meals to their vulnerable neighbours in Streatham, South London, and quickly expanded their services across the entire South London area due to the extraordinary demand.

Running operations from Sureh’s private home quickly became unfeasible with the lack of adequate space and facilities, but fortunately Cook to Care was offered a space at a disused youth centre kitchen in a deprived neighbourhood in Lambeth that just so happened to have a neglected outdoor space with unmaintained raised beds. The opportunity to reinstate the food growing area gave rise to integrating Cook to Care’s needs and counselling programmes into the space too, becoming an extension for therapeutic, meditative, safe and sensory experiences for young people to also enjoy.

The project was an opportunity to bridge the gap between poverty in the area and to increase food security, with the aim of reframing young people’s relationship with food while building their practical skills and awareness around the importance of healthy diets. The project aimed to facilitate a rich cocreative design and build process with youngsters, but unfortunately, after the second workshop, communication with the centre began to break down due to a myriad of challenges, from lockdowns to internal organisational restructuring at the youth centre. We may not have had the opportunity to actively engage with young people in this project, but a few volunteers, led by our valued HLC member Sam Perry, managed to improve some aspects of the outdoor space with some light touch designs, as seen from the before and after photographs below.

Through our introspection, we realised incidentally that learning by doing was a highly valuable method for building our knowledge base, methodologies and approaches on how our skills can be used to serve impoverished communities and encourage landscape professionals to pursue community driven projects. Sharing the failures of projects and learning early and often should be normalised so we can inspire a culture of innovation and learning within this sector.

Our aspirations to complete the outdoor space in Lambeth with the youngsters by mid-summer 2020 fell short, so this year we have decided to reconfigure our approach by focusing on building partnerships between the landscape profession and food charity organisations. By shifting to support Cook to Care’s objectives and needs, we hope to bring stories of success soon, including more details on a third initiative which entails mapping all the existing and potential areas of land suitable for food growing in Lambeth using GIS mapping, from rooftops, disused car parks and desolate spaces using open-source data sets. We hope this opportunity will generate a comprehensive food-growing map of Lambeth that can inform future local development of the area and increase food security, particularly in more deprived neighbourhoods within the Borough.

Sowing the first seedlings (30th July 2020).

‘Before’ shot of the Youth Centre’s Garden (2nd June 2020)

Cook to Care volunteers in an ‘after’ shot of the Youth Centre’s Garden (30th November 2020).

We know that the magnitude of the issue is huge and so is the complexity, however, we implore the profession to start educating ourselves about the processes, policies, and economics of agriculture that affect urban and regional agriculture. The pandemic, much like any other sudden, extreme crises (war, for example), offers the tantalising possibility of exercising radical change, so we urge the profession to consider taking serious action towards strengthening our regional and local food system resiliency. To conclude, we would like to share our most significant lessons and approaches to tackling localised food insecurity in London from the past year, with varying degrees of success:

– Food Share Initiative was a great success as a knee-jerk reaction to food banks facing a sudden gap between their supply and demand, but it came as a result of us being everyday people trying to help our neighbours – rather than being landscape professionals. We’re long-term, strategic thinkers and this experience evidenced the theory that our skillset is more suited to long-term resilience building than crisis response.

– As landscape architects, we’re used to working in a project with RIBA Workstages, but our number one mistake at the Youth Centre was to see it as another project. What they needed was a mentor who could help them build up an interest in the outdoor space, take them through the design and build process, and then have an ongoing presence. Due to our physical distance from them and time commitments, we couldn’t be that mentor and build that trust with the youth – so Cook to Care will be that interface going forward.

– Supporting our local food heroes must happen in two steps: first, listen to their stories and build a strong relationship with them; second, decide together how your skills could be most helpful. Each person’s case and our capacities to help will be different, but we can guarantee that it will always be mutually beneficial.

Now, take these lessons and start your own food story.

References

1 The Trussell Trust, 2019. State of Hunger. https:// www.stateofhunger. org/wp-content/ uploads/2019/11/ State-of-Hunger-Report- November2019-Digital. pdf

2 The Trussell Trust, 2019. https://www. stateofhunger.org/

3 King’s College London, 2020. Vulnerability to food insecurity since the COVID-19 lockdown. https://foodfoundation. org.uk/publication/ vulnerability-to-foodinsecurity-since-thecovid-19-lockdown/

4 Cetin, E., P., d., 2020. Black people, racism and human rights: understanding food poverty. https://committees. parliament.uk/ writtenevidence/11581/ html/#_ftnref11