Across the UK and Ireland, a quiet revolution is underway.
It’s sprouting where you might least expect it. In old baths and window boxes. In reclaimed parking lots and allotment plots. In the green places you walk past every day – gardens, parks, school playgrounds- with hardly a second glance.
It cracks the pavement open, this revolution. It breathes and it feeds. It is the revolution that happens when we reclaim seeds in the city. The Urban Seed Revolution.
Our new film, A Quiet Revolution celebrates the work of London’s little-known urban seed savers and introduces trailblazing networks, like the London Freedom Seed Bank, which connect these custodians in towns and cities across the land.
The film highlights how and why the creativity, resilience and drive of urban seed savers matters in the urban areas that host 83% of the UK population and 64% of those living in Ireland.
Urban seed savers are adapting hundreds of crop varieties to unique urban climates, providing healthy, nutritious food for communities that have been failed by the industrial food system.
Through the food they grow and the seeds they share, they are bringing people together across divides of age, class, gender and race, creating community and helping to improve people's mental and physical health.
By tending to and protecting oases of green space in the city, they are making space for the wild, opening windows to enchantment and the re-weaving of living systems in urban areas.
In this interactive story, we visit some of the urban seed custodians from A Quiet Revolution to learn a little more about the challenges, opportunities and importance of coaxing life from city soils.
Dee Woods. Granville Community Kitchen, North West London.
My name is Dee Woods and I am a food and farming actionist. What that means is I work from the grassroots, through to policy and governance and from seed to plate and beyond.
Granville Community Kitchen is based in the Granville Community Centre in North West London. It emerged in 2014 as a response to entrenched social deprivation, including hunger as a result of poverty. We cook food, we grow food, we teach people how to grow their own food and to compost and to cook. We also do some food aid, which has really increased during the pandemic.
Food growing, as well as sharing food and eating together, cooking together, I think is probably the greatest tool in terms of breaking down barriers. It doesn't matter whether you're black, white, rich, poor, can't speak English, speak English, whatever your age, it breaks down barriers.
Seed, like food, helps to build community, it brings different people together within the garden, learning about each other's heritage, learning about food cultures and learning how to save and store those seeds.
Seed connects us to the past and it connects us to the future. Whoever controls the seed has power. And as we shift power and reclaim power from the corporations, we have to take control of our seed. Seed, for me, is life.
Richard Galpin. Walworth, South London.
My name’s Richard and I grow and save seed in my backyard in Walworth, just a couple of minutes from Elephant and Castle in South London
I've been growing in this space for five or six years. When I moved in, it was just a bricked over yard all the way back, so it involved quite a lot of digging out rubble, you know, built on the previous terrace.
A common challenge of urban growing is that you don't actually have any soil. There's a bit of London clay down there somewhere in a few patches, but mostly it's rubble. Every inch of growing space really involves quite a lot of work. It’s a labour of love to dig out the rubble and then start building the soil slowly over time by adding in all the bulky organic matter, adding in lots of compost. Slowly, slowly, it starts to emerge from there.
When I save seed, it's probably the most satisfying thing I ever do. I particularly like growing and saving seed from lettuce. I am very keen on lettuce. There's just something about the delicacy of it in an urban environment which feels particularly poignant. If you can manage to coax this delicate, floppy leaf out of these harsh growing conditions, then that seems particularly satisfying, particularly in winter, you know, when you get the colours- the dark reds - really coming through strongly as the temperature drops.
A plateful of those salad leaves in the depths of winter is just fabulous.
Helene Schulze. Garden of Earthly Delights, Hackney. North East London.
My name's Helene, and I am part of the Garden of Earthly Delights, which is a community garden in Hackney, made by a guerrilla gardening collective.
We began by squatting a site a few minutes away on Graham Road a few years ago, with the belief that derelict space over prolonged periods of time in a city like London, where so few people have access to green spaces of their own, is deeply problematic.
I love the deeply collective and quite chaotic spirit of this garden. It’s a really gloriously motley collective of growers, artists, architects, activists and carpenters who’ve collectively made this. I think you feel that when you walk in, you feel that there’s the love and hands of many, many people here. It feels playful and alive.
Access to outdoor space is an unbelievable privilege most Londoners don’t have. Spaces where groups can come together to grow together, I think, are a really powerful response to a city that has lots of people cooped up in very small spaces. They challenge the kind of dynamics that allow for such a disparity to emerge.
This space gives us the chance to grow crops that are most relevant to where we are; which are the most delish and well-adapted to our local growing conditions. That's something that seed companies very far away just can't offer us.
By growing our own seeds here, we are able to really tie what we eat to the land. But with access to green space so limited, we have to be part of networks of exchange to get all the seed varieties we want and need. It’s just not possible to grow all those varieties in one small urban space.
By connecting with others, perhaps friends or networks like the London Freedom Seed Bank, to exchange seed, we are helping each other to grow all sorts of different varieties without needing to provide everything directly for ourselves.
It's really powerful that together we can share such a diversity of seeds. Collectively looking after our seed diversity is a quiet but powerful act of resistance to a corporate seed regime that's dominated by a select few companies.
Olcay Çolak. Walworth, South London.
My name is Olcay. I have had a small allotment plot here in Panton Place, near Elephant and Castle, for four years now. It is a very secret place. There are ivies, bushes and some wild trees that screen off the road.
At the moment we have eleven people growing here. We all have small plots, but we are happy. I just love to come here and meet with my friends. We ask each other how our days are going. We dig, or plant, or pick something, we relax and I think we feel much happier when we are working with our hands. Even if my friends aren’t around, I speak with my plants. It makes me feel calm. Peaceful.
I generally grow some vegetables, as well as flowers. Originally I got a lot of seeds from my Dad. Tomato seeds, basil seeds, cucumber seeds. He got them from his mum. They were the first gardeners in our village and my grandma, she kept her seeds very carefully, planting and saving them year-on-year. Now I have those seeds here and they do very well.
These seeds remind me of where I grew up. I grew up living on a farm. When I come here, even though it's just a little place, when I touch the soil and when I dig, when I plant, I feel I am back in my childhood and in my country. It makes that connection.
Charlotte Dove. Sydenham Gardens, South London.
My name’s Charlotte and I work at Sydenham Garden, which is a mental health charity based in South London.
I work on the garden project, so I'm based here three days a week. We run four different sessions, mixed sessions for people with all kinds of different mental health problems. We get together, grow food, do crafts, look after the nature reserve and generally have a good time.
In our food growing space we try to grow crops from all over the world. Crops that represent the diversity of people that come to us. We do a lot of seed saving as well.
Everything we do is about nurturing people, and fostering community, making people feel strong enough to go and face the world outside. Seed saving fits really nicely into that, because it's a slow process, and it's quite a meditative process that's very different to the crazy, busy world out there. I think people really appreciate the chance to come here, slow down and do something which is very focussed on being here, detached from the worries outside.
To think that every single seed variety that we have today is here because our ancestors have put in the work and had the foresight to protect and improve those varieties for us… I think it's just incredible. I'm in awe of that heritage and I'd like to be able to contribute to that in my own small way by saving seed and sharing my passion with other people.
Anne Gumuschian. Glengall Wharf Garden, South East London
My name’s Anne and this is Glengall Wharf Garden, a community space and community garden. I'm involved in a small group of food growers here at the garden. Three of us grow food here for the local pantry, which is like a food bank where local people struggling to afford food can buy good food for very little money. Local residents are able to buy £15 worth of food for £4.50.
Unfortunately there's plenty of need for food aid at the moment. It's very important for us to be able to create systems of solidarity and systems that give people access to food, and in particular to good, healthy food. We make a point of only growing organically and to harvest our crops just an hour before delivery so people do get the best vegetables possible.
We mainly grow plants donated by local garden centres. We also grow from seeds donated to us by the London Freedom Seed Bank, which gave us a solidarity pack during the pandemic. That's been very helpful for us because of the wide variety of seeds we received. We grow tomatoes, peppers, courgettes and chillies in the poly-tunnel and various other things in the beds, such as the beans, more courgettes, calaloo, and so on and so forth outdoors.
To me, food justice means access and availability to good food for all, really. People shouldn’t have to go out of their way to access good food. It should be something natural. Something a lot more organic than it is right now.
There’s a strong connection between this food justice and the seed saving. We’re creating systems of solidarity that give us, and people around us, more control over the way that we eat, the way we grow and, ultimately, the way we think.
UK & Ireland Seed Sovereignty Programme
The Gaia Foundation's Sovereignty Programme is working to (re)establish a biodiverse and resilient seed system & small-scale seed production across Britain & Ireland. We support small-scale commercial growers, community groups and home gardeners & allotmenteers with workshops, networks, resources and information to help protect and restore seed diversity across the UK & Ireland.
Credits:
Andy Pilsbury