F E AT U R E By Jill White
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Bath City Farm – farming for life Bath City Farm has been bringing nature into this historic city for 25 years. Its impact on the immediate community as well as the city is significant.
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arming appeals to us, from the daydreams of city dwellers to the popularity of a range of television programmes following people taking up new lives farming, or making a living in wild areas. No surprise to find, then, that city farms are drawing in thousands of visitors to enjoy animals and food growing first hand. But what has led to this popularity and how are such farms benefitting communities across the UK and 22
Europe? What do they do that is so appealing and how can we as landscape architects use this to inform our work? City or urban farms have come a long way since they first emerged in the early 1970s, from the community garden movement. The latter had taken over often derelict and abandoned sites a while after WW2 and used them to put people back in touch with nature and provide open space for meeting places and learning
to garden. City farms combined this successful model with the introduction of farm animals and teaching how to care for them. The first UK city farm was in Kentish Town in 1972 and there are now around 65 in the UK1. They built on projects successfully pioneered in the Netherlands (known there as “children’s farms”) which currently attract millions of visitors. The UK city farms and community gardens joined to form their own Federation in 1980, to enable them
