Admittedly,
it sounds like the most foolhardy of criminal capers, and one of the cheekiest,
too.
Outside the
police station in the small Victorian mill town of Todmorden, West Yorkshire,
there are three large raised flower beds.
If you’d
visited a few months ago, you’d have found them overflowing with curly kale, carrot
plants, lettuces, spring onions — all manner of vegetables and salad leaves.
Today the
beds are bare. Why? Because people have been wandering up to the police station
forecourt in broad daylight and digging up the vegetables. And what are the
cops doing about this brazen theft from right under their noses? Nothing.
 |
| Food for thought: Todmorden resident Estelle Brown, a former interior designer, with a basket of home-grown veg |
Well,
that’s not quite correct.
‘I watch
’em on camera as they come up and pick them,’ says desk officer Janet Scott,
with a huge grin. It’s the smile that explains everything.
For the
vegetable-swipers are not thieves. The police station carrots — and thousands
of vegetables in 70 large beds around the town — are there for the taking.
Locals are encouraged to help themselves. A few tomatoes here, a handful of
broccoli there. If they’re in season, they’re yours. Free.
So there
are (or were) raspberries, apricots and apples on the canal towpath;
blackcurrants, redcurrants and strawberries beside the doctor’s surgery; beans
and peas outside the college; cherries in the supermarket car park; and mint,
rosemary, thyme and fennel by the health centre.
The
vegetable plots are the most visible sign of an amazing plan: to make Todmorden
the first town in the country that is self-sufficient in food.
‘And we
want to do it by 2018,’ says Mary Clear, 56, a grandmother of ten and
co-founder of Incredible Edible, as the scheme is called.
‘It’s a
very ambitious aim. But if you don’t aim high, you might as well stay in bed,
mightn’t you?’
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So what’s
to stop me turning up with a huge carrier bag and grabbing all the rosemary in
the town?
‘Nothing,’
says Mary.
What’s to
stop me nabbing all the apples?
‘Nothing.’
All your
raspberries?
‘Nothing.’
It just doesn’t
happen like that, she says. ‘We trust people. We truly believe — we are witness
to it — that people are decent.’
When she
sees the Big Issue seller gathering fruit for his lunch, she feels only
pleasure. What does it matter, argues Mary, if once in a while she turns up
with her margarine tub to find that all the strawberries are gone?
‘This is a
revolution,’ she says. ‘But we are gentle revolutionaries. Everything we do is
underpinned by kindness.’
The idea
came about after she and co-founder Pam Warhurst, the former owner of the
town’s Bear Cafe, began fretting about the state of the world and wondered what
they could do.
They
reasoned that all they could do is start locally, so they got a group of
people, mostly women, together in the cafe.
 |
| Incredible Edible is about more than plots of veg. It's about educating people about food, and stimulating the local economy (pictured Vincent Graff and Estelle) |
‘Wars come
about by men having drinks in bars, good things come about when women drink
coffee together,’ says Mary.
‘Our
thinking was: there’s so much blame in the world — blame local government,
blame politicians, blame bankers, blame technology — we thought, let’s just do
something positive instead.’
We’re
standing by a car park in the town centre. Mary points to a housing estate up
the hill. Her face lights up.
‘The
children walk past here on the way to school. We’ve filled the flower beds with
fennel and they’ve all been taught that if you bite fennel, it tastes like a
liquorice gobstopper. When I see the children popping little bits of herb into
their mouths, I just think it’s brilliant.’
She takes
me over to the front garden of her own house, a few yards away.
Three years
ago, when Incredible Edible was launched, she did a very unusual thing: she lowered
her front wall, in order to encourage passers-by to walk into her garden and
help themselves to whatever vegetables took their fancy.
There were
signs asking people to take something but it took six months for folk to ‘get
it’, she says.
They get it
now. Obviously a few town-centre vegetable plants — even thousands of them —
are not going to feed a community of 15,000 by themselves.
But the
police station potatoes act as a recruiting sergeant — to encourage residents
to grow their own food at home.
Today,
hundreds of townspeople who began by helping themselves to the communal veg are
now well on the way to self-sufficiency.
But out on
the street, what gets planted where? There’s kindness even in that.
‘The ticket
man at the railway station, who was very much loved, was unwell. Before he
died, we asked him: “What’s your favourite vegetable, Reg?” It was broccoli. So
we planted memorial beds with broccoli at the station. One stop up the line, at
Hebden Bridge, they loved Reg, too — and they’ve also planted broccoli in his
memory.’
Not that
all the plots are — how does one put this delicately? — ‘official’.
Take the
herb bushes by the canal. Owners British Waterways had no idea locals had been
sowing plants there until an official inspected the area ahead of a visit by
the Prince of Wales last year (Charles is a huge Incredible Edible fan).
Estelle
Brown, a 67-year-old former interior designer who tended the plot, received an
email from British Waterways.
‘I was a
bit worried to open it,’ she says. ‘But it said: “How do you build a raised
bed? Because my boss wants one outside his office window.”’
Incredible
Edible is also about much more than plots of veg. It’s about educating people
about food, and stimulating the local economy.
There are
lessons in pickling and preserving fruits, courses on bread-making, and the
local college is to offer a BTEC in horticulture. The thinking is that young
people who have grown up among the street veg may make a career in food.
Crucially,
the scheme is also about helping local businesses. The Bear, a wonderful shop
and cafe with a magnificent original Victorian frontage, sources all its
ingredients from farmers within a 30-mile radius.
There’s a
brilliant daily market. People here can eat well on local produce, and
thousands now do.
Meanwhile,
the local school was recently awarded a £500,000 Lottery grant to set up a fish
farm in order to provide food for the locals and to teach useful skills to
young people.
Jenny
Coleman, 62, who retired here from London, explains: ‘We need something for our
young people to do. If you’re an 18-year-old, there’s got to be a good answer
to the question: why would I want to stay in Todmorden?’
The day I
visit, the town is battered by a bitterly-cold rain storm. Yet the place radiates warmth. People speak
to each other in the street, wave as neighbours drive past, smile.
If the
phrase hadn’t been hijacked, the words ‘we’re all in this together’ would
spring to mind.
So what
sort of place is Todmorden (known locally, without exception, as ‘Tod’)? If
you’re assuming it’s largely peopled by middle-class grandmothers, think again.
Nor is this place a mecca for the gin-and-Jag golf club set.
Set in a
Pennine valley — once, the road through the town served as the border between
Yorkshire and Lancashire — it is a vibrant mix of age, class and ethnicity.
A third of
households do not own a car; a fifth do not have central heating.
You can
snap up a terrace house for £50,000 — or spend close to £1 million on a
handsome stone villa with seven bedrooms.
And the
scheme has brought this varied community closer together, according to Pam
Warhurst.
Take one
example. ‘The police have told us that, year on year, there has been a
reduction in vandalism since we started,’ she says. ‘We weren’t expecting
this.’
So why has
it happened?
Pam says:
‘If you take a grass verge that was used as a litter bin and a dog toilet and
turn it into a place full of herbs and fruit trees, people won’t vandalise it.
I think we are hard-wired not to damage food.’
Pam reckons
a project like Incredible Edible could thrive in all sorts of places. ‘If the
population is very transient, it’s difficult. But if you’ve got schools, shops,
back gardens and verges, you can do it.’
Similar
schemes are being piloted in 21 other towns in the UK, and there’s been
interest shown from as far afield as Spain, Germany, Hong Kong and Canada. And,
this week, Mary Clear gave a talk to an all-party group of MPs at Westminster.
Todmorden
was visited by a planner from New Zealand, working on the rebuilding of his
country after February’s earthquake.
Mary says:
‘He went back saying: “Why wouldn’t we rebuild the railway station with
pick-your-own herbs? Why wouldn’t we rebuild the health centre with apple
trees?”
‘What we’ve
done is not clever. It just wasn’t being done.’
The final
word goes to an outsider. Joe Strachan is a wealthy U.S. former sales director
who decided to settle in Tod with his Scottish wife, after many years in
California.
He is 61
but looks 41. He became active with Incredible Edible six months ago, and
couldn’t be happier digging, sowing and juicing fruit.
I find
myself next to him, sheltering from the driving rain. Why, I ask, would someone
forsake the sunshine of California for all this?
His answer
sums up what the people around here have achieved.
‘There’s a
nobility to growing food and allowing people to share it. There’s a feeling
we’re doing something significant rather than just moaning that the state can’t
take care of us.
‘Maybe we
all need to learn to take care of ourselves.’
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