Guerrilla Gardeners Go Mainstream

There’s a wonderful organisation out there, a group of people who were considered a bit bonkers at the time they started , whose mission in life is to turn roundabouts into flower beds. They’re the Guerrilla Gardeners . The idea is that in covert, night time highly-organised operations they'd grab an unused and unloved piece of land, mostly in urban areas and beautify it with flowers. A sort of Alan Titchmarsh in `Milk-Tray Man' garb.

It’s the kind of thing that councils should be doing, but these days in many places they can’t afford to. The reaction to the Guerrilla Gardeners was mixed – Many communities welcomed them with open arms, but some local authorities were decidedly sniffy, citing things like `elf & safety as the traditional reason for wanting this outrageous behaviour stopped. It's the kind of thing that gives elves a bad name.

A garden plot at Linthorpe Primary School in Middlesbrough

Now though the principle of grabbing any spare bit of land going has become `legit’, and is even being encouraged, but not for flowers. With food price inflation hitting 12% and petrol heading towards £2 a litre many people, and indeed those in authority, are looking for new and cheaper ways to feed the ever growing population. Urban Farming has become the buzzword these days, with a slightly Utopian concept that you can feed the cities from land within the cities. It harks back to the `Dig for Victory’ campaigns of the war years and the allotment movement which both preceded and followed the Second World War.

In recent times many of those allotments have been under threat. A friend of mine has just fought off a plot (sorry) to take away the allotments where she grows food, to extend a golf course. Fortunately the local council stepped in and protected the land. Not everybody has been so lucky. Over the past thirty years, something like two hundred thousand allotments have been lost in the UK.

In the North of England there’s a different approach being taken, with the Urban Farming project set up in Middlesbrough under a series of events called DOTT 07. DOTT stands for Designs of the Times, and it’s all about community involvement. In the case of Middlesbrough more than two hundred and fifty scraps of land have been identified which can be used to grow vegetables... many of them small and unused.

The organisers admit that it won’t feed the people of Teesside, but it might get them thinking about growing their own. The quantity of food grown on an allotment can make more of a difference to the cost of feeding a family, and can go a long way to supplying the annual vegetable requirements for four people.

More than seventy schools in the borough are taking part, giving kids the chance to grow and eat their own food, and perhaps understand a bit more about how it’s done and the amount of work involved. And people in local neighbourhoods are being asked to identify patches of land which could be planted with vegetables. So the waste ground of Middlesbrough may be bringing lettuce to a salad bar near you soon, and it won’t be done by people creeping around at night either.