- Growing food together
- Calling for hospital food standards
- Campaigning for bees, forage and a pesticide free city
- 2,012 new food growing spaces by the end of 2012
- For better school food, and food skills, and protecting children from junk food marketing
- An informal network of London restaurants and catering businesses that care about sustainability
- Evidence of the contribution of food and farming to climate change
- Find or set up a Food Co-op in your area
- Helping producers, consumers, retailers and caterers provide healthy and sustainable food
- Inspired by the London 2012 Food Vision, the campaign for healthy and sustainable food in catering
- Sustainable food news in London
- Working for sustainable food at the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games
- For bread made with natural ingredients
- Challenging businesses and citizens to make London the world's first Sustainable Fish City
- Practical advice for anyone interested in buying and using more sustainable food
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Download a PDF version of Growing Round the Houses: Food production on housing estates
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Visit the London Food Link homepage, or follow the links below to view pages from this site section
Growing Round the Houses is a briefing paper by Sustain and the Women’s Environmental Network (WEN), explaining how social housing providers and their tenants can work together on their estates to grow food, and the many benefits that this brings for community cohesion, healthy eating and improving green space, especially for families living on a low income.
Now, more than ever, we need to grow more food, closer to where we live, that is tasty, wholesome and nutritious, that enhances rather than destroys the environment we depend on, and that satisfies people’s need for a secure and trusted food supply. Sustain’s previous reports on urban agriculture and WEN’s substantial experience of working with communities to establish urban food growing projects highlight multiple benefits, including:
- educational value for children and adults
- appreciation of how food is produced as part of encouraging a healthy diet
- improved access to healthy affordable food in areas where this is a problem
- improvement of physical and mental health as a result of regular outdoor activity, and contact with nature
- preservation of green space in urban areas
- the sense of achievement and empowerment of disadvantaged communities gaining new skills, or using existing skills (particularly within immigrant communities from rural backgrounds).
As well giving advice on how to set up a food growing project on their estate, it describes examples such as the Spitalfields Estate Community Garden, where residents worked together to build themselves a food growing space for vegetables and herbs popular with the local ethnic minority community.
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