The Nutritional Supplement

Pam Warhurst, co-founder of Incredible Edible Todmorden (IET) is the kind of woman who gets things done. After attending a lecture on sustainability she starting thinking (but not for long) about what she could do in her local community of Todmorden in West Yorkshire, to show people how it’s possible to live our lives differently.  She had a 2 hour train journey ahead of her and by the time she had got back to Yorkshire she had written a model for the Incredible Edible project on the back of a Virgin Trains serviette.  Any similarity to J.K. Rowling, however, ends there.  Pam doesn’t ask permission to publish, she just goes ahead and publishes.  “Incredible doesn’t talk about doing, it just does,” she said, with some alacrity.

IET was founded in 2008 by Pam Warhurst and Mary Clear and a group of like-minded individuals who believed in the power of small actions.  The aim behind the Incredible Edible Project was to use local food as a means of engaging people to enter into a conversation about how they live their lives.  Pam’s view was that, when one person starts to do something positive, others naturally follow suit, ultimately resulting in a collective movement that can have far-reaching effects.  With 120 community groups around the UK now following the IET model the network has also spread to France, Canada, the USA and Australia.

The IET model is based on the ‘three plates’ of community, learning and business.  By taking something that everybody knows about – food – the idea was to get people in the local community engaged in conversation by turning disused plots into herb and vegetable gardens.  Did they ask for permission to plant their first plot? Of course not!  They chose a plot which had been neglected by the local Council and planted some herbs and put signs up telling passers-by to help themselves.  At first, people were wary of helping themselves, being English and polite and/or suspicious of apparently free food, but slowly locals started freely helping themselves.  Picture signs were put up so passers-by could easily identify what was growing, and a traffic-light system used to show when foods were ripe and ready to be picked.

What the IET team discovered when they started taking over these disused plots, is that the local Council would then meet them halfway and help to maintain them!  As time went by, the IET team moved on to planting outside Health Centres and Police Stations (on these occasions they did ask for permission first!).  Provided the proprietors were not required to get involved in the work or fund the project in any way, most were happy for their land to be cultivated with edible plants.  Pam told us that the first Health Centre they planted was where the serial killer Harold Shipman had once practiced as a GP.  She noted, with some irony, that where people once thought about death, they now see the gardens and think about life.

The scheme was so successful that when a new multi-million pound Health Centre was built, the NHS Commissioning Group decided their policy should be amended to include edible gardens as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility programmes.

Meanwhile, police from all over the UK are visiting the site in Todmorden, not to learn how to grow vegetables, but to learn about how the IET project has helped to foster community relations – an important element of local policing – and how it has reduced local crime, in particular vandalism.

Then they began to link up with schools (the Learning plate of the scheme) in order to develop skills and awareness of local food from the grassroots upwards.  Pam told a lovely story about a private garden that they planted (with permission) on a house which was situated near to a local council estate.  One day, a mother and her two children from the estate were walking past and the children went into the garden and picked some vegetables to take home. The next day, the children returned to the garden to place the leftover vegetables in the compost bin, and left a pot of soup made using the vegetables they had picked, on the owner’s doorstep. 

Another development was that one of the local school chefs asked if he could do pop-up cookery demonstrations around the local area. Since then, additional social enterprises have been created such as the Incredible Farm which trains young people in small scale commercial food growing and marketing skills; and the Incredible Aqua Garden which combines state-of-the-art growing systems such as aquaponics and hydroponics with more traditional techniques to help provide sustainable local food for schools, families and communities.  The Incredible Farm is now a stand-alone not-for-profit company and recently won second place in the Lloyds Bank Entrepreneur of the Year 2015 Awards, winning itself a prize of £6,000.

The scheme then expanded into supporting local businesses.  Todmorden had an active market hall in the town centre but it was not thriving.  They managed to fund raise for six blackboards (£90), branded with Incredible Edible on the top and asked market stallholders if they would use them to list the products they had on offer.  This created awareness among the public of local food and cultivated a desire to buy more local food, thus boosting local businesses and the local economy.  This led to more market stallholders wanting the blackboards, so they were able to sell these to them at cost.  Other local suppliers became interested (eg. local meat suppliers, dairy products, local breweries, etc) and then local restaurateurs got involved by wanting to purchase from local suppliers and promote this to their customers.

IET also created a Green Route through the town which took people past all the planted gardens but also past the market hall and local shops and cafes.  In this way, the local foot fall has been diverted from the large chain supermarkets to discovering the town’s local shops and producers.  A Green Route map was designed for free by a couple of local design students, and today a whole ‘Vegetable Tourism’ movement has emerged where tourists now come specifically to walk the Green Route in Todmorden instead of passing it by on their way to the rather more glamourous Hebden Bridge!

Another spin-off of the project has been that the people of Todmorden now have a view on what happens in their local community and to the land around it.  A recent local planning proposal to build on green space in the town had to be shelved due to the local community rejecting the scheme outright.  Eight years ago, only a small minority would have sat up and taken notice of such a scheme, but not anymore!

By and large, Pam said, the project has required very little money, no policy documents, no formal permissions required and has received very little negative response.  If someone objects to planting fruit trees on their land, it’s normally because they think they will have to fund the scheme or maintain the gardens themselves.  By talking through what the issues are, they nearly always discover that there is, in fact, no problem in the first place, or if there is, there is nearly always a solution to suit all parties.

The scheme, which started off as an experiment with no strategy, evidence-based research or policy document behind it, has been so successful that university students are now conducting their PhDs and research projects on it.  One such project is The Incredible Northern Greenhouse project (ING), a live project conducted by students of the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield.  The ING aims to expand the IET scheme by linking up towns and regions in the North from Liverpool to Hull, recommending specific locations along the route for collaborative intervention.  One of the recommended locations is HMP Humber Prison in Hull.  Part of the project included the production of a video to illustrate the scheme which can be viewed on

The Incredible Edible project is evidence of the power of small actions.  A recent survey undertaken as part of a European Union Leonardo Project to assess the impact of IET showed that 96% of local residents like the growing of food in public spaces; 67% of local residents collect food and herbs from these public spaces; 97% of local residents say they buy more local food today as compared to five years ago and 57% of local residents have begun to grow their own food following the example of IET (Source: Leonardo IET Project, 2013: Sample of 100 local residents).

It is also an inspiring story, delivered by an inspiring speaker and co-founder, showing how communities can run themselves in order to be more ‘food independent’ while at the same time promoting health and well-being.

There’s no denying it, Pam Warhurst is the kind of woman who gets things done.

A book detailing the Incredible Edible story is now available with 25% discount until 24th December 2015.

Useful Links

http://www.incredible-edible-todmorden.co.uk/home

http://www.incredibleediblenetwork.org.uk/

Pam’s Presentation Slides: http://www.tess-transition.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Speech_Warhurst.compressed.pdf