[Scpg] Todmorden's Good life: Introducing Britain's greenest town

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

Todmorden's Good life: Introducing Britain's greenest town
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/todmordens-good-life-introducing-britains-greenest-town-1830666.html
'Grow your own' fever has gripped the Pennines 
community, which is aiming for self-sufficiency
By Joanna Moorhead
Sunday, 29 November 2009


It's an ordinary small town in England, but its 
residents claim they've discovered the secret 
that could save the planet. And with world 
leaders preparing to gather in Copenhagen in just 
over a week's time to debate how to do just that, 
the people of Todmorden in the Pennines this week 
issued an invitation: come to our town and see 
what we've done.

In under two years, Todmorden has transformed the 
way it produces its food and the way residents 
think about the environment. Compared with 18 
months ago, a third more townspeople now grow 
their own veg; almost seven in 10 now buy local 
produce regularly, and 15 times as many people 
are keeping chickens.

The town centre is dotted with "help yourself" 
vegetable gardens; the market groans with local 
meat and vegetables, and at all eight of the 
town's schools the pupils eat locally produced 
meat and vegetables every lunchtime.

"It's a complete turnaround," said Pam Warhurst, 
a former leader of Calderdale Council, board 
member of Natural England and the person who 
masterminded the project - called Incredible 
Edible - and motivated her friends and neighbours 
to join in. "Our aim is to make our town entirely 
self-sufficient in food production by 2018 - and 
if we can carry on at the same rate as we've done 
over the past 18 months since we had our first 
meeting and set this initiative up, we're going 
to make it."

And the scheme's leaders are now hoping to export 
their idea: two weeks ago the town held a 
conference on how to make Incredible Edible-style 
initiatives work elsewhere, and more than 200 
people from across Britain attended.

They heard the story of Todmorden's 
transformation, starting with what Ms Warhurst 
calls the "propaganda planting" of vegetables 
around the town centre 18 months ago. Nick Green, 
who runs a converted mill that provides workspace 
for local artists, took on the job of doing the 
planting. He said he chose the first venue - a 
disused health centre - because it was in the 
middle of the town and would attract plenty of 
attention. "We wanted everyone to see what we 
were doing, so they could ask questions and 
ultimately join in," he said. "The old health 
centre has plenty of land in front, so it was 
ideal. I didn't ask anyone's permission: I just 
went there with my spade and my seeds and I 
planted cabbages and rhubarb."
Incredible Edible was originally funded out of 
the participants' own pockets. "We were very 
clear that we didn't want to look at what grants 
were available and mould our projects to suit 
them," said Mr Green. "We felt that what would 
work was to start with the town and what it 
needed. We'd look for money later on." What the 
project leaders found was that a lot could be 
achieved with small amounts of cash. And awards 
and grants have followed - the latest is the 
Kerrygold Farmers' Co-operatives Awards last 
week, when Incredible Edible won the "most 
inspirational community project" and £1,000.

One of the founding principles of the movement 
has been to make it as inclusive as possible; in 
this it differs from transition towns, said Ms 
Warhurst. "We are working with people who would 
find transition towns hard to identify with. Our 
project is all about finding the lowest common 
denominator, which is food, and then speaking in 
a language that everyone can understand. Plus we 
don't have strategies; we don't have visiting 
speakers; we don't have charters and documents. 
We just get on with things: this is all about 
action."

The project has been moulded to fit with where 
people in Todmorden are and the lives they lead. 
Many live in homes without gardens, and the local 
social housing landlord, Pennine Housing, has 
given out more than 1,000 starter packs of seeds 
and growing troughs, and invited tenants to 
cooking and gardening classes. "There are people 
here who don't own a recipe book and who don't 
have a garden, but we want to show them that they 
can still cook and grow vegetables," said Val 
Morris, the tenant involvement officer for 
Pennine Housing.

Other town-wide initiatives include a foraging 
course, on which participants learn how to find 
food for free, and then how to make preserves, 
jams and chutneys with their findings - and, more 
controversially, a workshop on how to kill and 
pluck your own chickens. "It's not for the faint 
hearted, but there's something entirely honest 
and right about killing the chickens you're going 
to eat," said Lynne Midwinter, a physiotherapist 
in the town who took her eight-year-old daughter 
along. "For my daughter, it's entirely normal to 
see chickens being killed and to help pluck them. 
"Some parents might think you can't let your kids 
see that, but what I'd say is, what kind of a 
life did the chickens your child usually eats 
have? Our chickens have a good life; they die a 
quick death, and seeing all that teaches the 
connection between rearing animals and eating 
them, which has been lost in much of the Western 
world today."
Ms Midwinter has also helped persuade local 
businesses to support Incredible Edible. "One of 
our early initiatives was to give all the stalls 
in the covered market a blackboard on which they 
could advertise any local food they were selling, 
to encourage them to sell more local food and to 
shout about it when they did," she said.
"And it's definitely worked. You now see most of 
the stalls advertising the fact that they're 
selling local beef and lamb, pork and bread, 
vegetables and even cheese - the first-ever 
Todmorden cheese, which is called East Lee, is 
now produced by the Pextenement Cheese Company at 
a farm on a hillside above the town."
Another venture has been the planting of apple, 
pear and plum trees at the town's newly built 
health centre. "The PCT was all set to grow the 
usual prickly bushes around it, and we said - 
hold on a second, why not food?" said Ms 
Warhurst. "They agreed, and we're going to 
encourage people to pick their fruit whenever 
they're passing the doctor's. Apart from giving 
them fresh fruit, maybe putting the trees there 
will help people make the connection between 
healthy eating, and being healthy."
Other projects in the pipeline include a 50m-long 
polytunnel being set up to grow bigger amounts of 
food and vegetables on a site just outside the 
town, a drop-in jam-making centre, a woodwork 
shop to supply chicken huts and greenhouses, and 
a vegetable garden at elderly people's care homes 
in the area which will be designed so that 
residents will be able to garden and pick 
vegetables from their wheelchairs.
There are also two herb gardens, one beside the 
main road and one at the new health centre. 
"Anyone can pick the herbs. They're a great way 
to get people enthused about cooking," said 
Helena Cook, who looks after the gardens.
She is also involved in trying to infect other 
local communities with the Incredible Edible 
spirit. "I'm a primary school teacher in a 
neighbouring town, Littleborough, and I've set up 
an Incredible Edible growing project with my 
pupils," she said. "The great thing is that it 
pulls the parents in as well, and I know some of 
them have already started growing their own 
vegetables at home. All of us who are involved in 
the Todmorden project try to export it to other 
neighbourhoods we have contact with."
The next project on the horizon is a fish farm 
that's being set up on land adjacent to the high 
school. Incredible Edible has applied for a 
lottery grant of £750,000 to set the farm up, and 
Ms Warhurst says she's confident their bid will 
be confirmed soon. There are also plans to offer 
a diploma in environmental and land-based studies 
to 14 to 19-year-olds, using local growing and 
food production initiatives as a resource. 
"That's fantastic because it's making our school 
a centre of excellence at teaching this vital 
skill - and it's kids who go into this kind of 
work who are going to be most useful to the world 
of tomorrow," said Ms Warhurst.
"The vital thing about Incredible Edible, and the 
thing that sets it apart, is that it involves 
everyone in the town and it's genuinely a 
grass-roots project. I honestly believe it's a 
blueprint for every neighbourhood. What we're 
doing here could easily be rolled out anywhere. 
It's all about involving people, giving them 
ownership, letting them realise it can be fun and 
interesting and that the food is delicious, and 
giving them space to set up their own ideas and 
run with them."
Ms Warhurst and the rest of the Incredible Edible 
team are now looking forward to their Christmas 
treat - a home-cooked dinner of turkey and all 
the trimmings in a local church centre, with 
every ingredient sourced locally. "We're growing 
the potatoes and sprouts on a special piece of 
land we call the Christmas dinner patch," said 
Helena Cook. "All the food, including the turkey, 
will be from Todmorden.
"There are even crumbs from locally baked bread, 
and local fruit, in my secret recipe Christmas 
pudding!"
SJ Clegg, 42
Smallholder
"Three years ago I gave up my job as a designer 
in London and moved to a converted barn above 
Todmorden to run a smallholding. So I was already 
here and keeping my own pigs, sheep, chicken and 
goats, but Incredible Edible has given a huge 
boost to what I do because it's made people in 
the town so much more aware of issues around 
locally produced food. The eggs I sell, for 
example, aren't watery like a lot of supermarket 
eggs: they've got big, orange yolks. And, perhaps 
most surprising of all, they're cheaper."
Pauline Mullarkey, 39
Mother of three
"I'd never grown a vegetable in my life and I had 
absolutely no idea how to do it, but when I heard 
about Incredible Edible from another mum in the 
school playground I knew it made sense. I started 
in my own garden by growing vegetables. It was 
far easier than I'd expected it to be. This year 
we've had potatoes, leeks, carrots, cabbage, 
strawberries, onions, garlic, peas, parsnips and 
sprouts, and I don't spend more than two hours a 
week in the garden.
"I also keep chickens. I've now got 15, and I'm 
currently putting together a map of everyone in 
the town who has them. The eventual aim is for 
every egg consumed in Todmorden to be a local 
one. We're working towards producing 30,000 eggs 
a week, and it's entirely possible that by 2018 
our egg production will be at those levels. And 
people catch on quick - you often hear people in 
shops asking for Todmorden eggs."
Tony Mulgrew, 46
Catering manager at Todmorden High School
"There was some wasteland beside the school and 
one day I looked out at it and thought, we could 
grow the vegetables for the school dinners on 
that! I asked the governors, they agreed, and we 
started growing in February 2009. Year 8 and Year 
10 pupils helped, and by the summer term we were 
able to serve tomato soup made from our tomatoes, 
as well as potatoes, courgettes, runner beans, 
lettuce, endive and chard.
"The fruit was amazing - we had blueberries, 
gooseberries - and the strawberries went on for 
ages. What was really good was the pride the 
pupils took in seeing the food they'd helped 
produce on the menu in the school dining room. I 
also source all our meat from local farms. I'd 
say that all the meat we serve here is produced 
within a half-hour's walk from the door. Plenty 
of top restaurants can't make that boast."
Nick Green, 52
Sculptor and owner of local mill that provides workspace for other artists
"In April 2008 they told me: you're our guerrilla 
gardener! So off I went and started planting 
vegetables. I started with rhubarb because the 
great thing about it is that people recognise it, 
so they know when it's ready to pick. At that 
stage I put up a sign inviting people to pick 
whatever they wanted to take home. And people 
did. We wanted to show that it's a project for 
anyone, that it's about ownership for the whole 
community.
"I've now got lots of food growing all over 
Todmorden - chard and kale as well as rhubarb - 
and we've recruited people from the mental health 
inclusion scheme to help with the planting. 
That's been a good move because people with 
mental health problems appreciate the chance to 
do meaningful work, and what could be more 
meaningful than growing food for the whole 
community?"
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