29th May 2012                       

Two women have transformed a small mill town on the historic Lancashire/Yorkshire borders into Incredible Edible Todmorden! Mary Clear (pictured) and Pam Warhurst are vegetable activists, who instead of getting down about the prospect of rising sea levels, melting ice caps, and social injustice, have decided to take action.

Together with a group of local helpers sharing their concerns, they are transforming Todmorden, which has high unemployment and no industry. They took up the challenge to make their town better to perhaps get people thinking about the environment through local food initiatives and have ambitions to be self-sufficient by 2018.

Todmorden was once a thriving cotton town, but as Mary Clear puts it, 'It’s a market town trying to survive in a supermarket culture.'  She was speaking at a Agroecology Group meeting at the House of Commons, just one of her many countrywide talks about Todmorden, where she inspired everyone with her clever ethos of generosity rather than consumption.

Mary’s mission to create a kinder world to deal with what lies ahead in an uncertain future does not involve being a victim or blaming politicians, bankers, scientists or anybody else that can be blamed.  This is a participatory action plan to grab the future for themselves. She said, 'We chose to use food as our agent of change. We thought food crosses all cultures, all barriers, all ages. It’ll work for everybody. If you eat, you’re in!'

Her inclusive approach recognises that modernity has run out of steam for many communities. Before the Industrial Revolution came and went Todmorden was a self-sufficient hilltop agricultural settlement and it is the re-envisioning of the past that is re-envigorating the town and its 15,000 inhabitants.

Pam Warhurst had no difficulty in engaging the local community. She believes that people want to do things, they just don’t know what to do. She recalls the first meeting to put forward her proposal for Todmorden where she said, "The time to act is now, let’s not write a report, let’s just get on with it, we can cook, we can share, we can grow," and the whole room exploded!

A simple tripart model was put together to transform Todmorden, which Mary says is not special, and could be applied to any town or village:

• Business – A town is nothing without business, so support, promote and engage with businesses so that our children and our children’s children have got a future in a small town.
• Communities – Work with communities; listen to the poor,help, engage, celebrate, work cross-culturally to get people interacting with their environment, understanding their food and perhaps making a kinder world.
• Learning – Try to make a shift in learning. Thousands of our children are not going to go to university and are not going to walk into jobs like the lucky older generation did. So work with learning.

The people of Todmorden started with their own hands. They took unloved and derelict land and made it beautiful.They built community beds full of vegetables on the main road, at the railway station, outside the police station, right out where people could see them. In the Health Centre grounds they created an apothocary garden (pictured) brimming with fruits and herbs so that patients can help themselves when they visit the doctor.

There are six primary schools and one high school in Todmorden, all of which are growing food. The high school provides its own lunches from local food that the kids sometimes source by going up to the hilltop farms. Another school has invested in polytunnels and one school with no land got permission to build growing space in the local graveyard where the soil is very good.

It is harder to get the message about good food to people who are living in housing estates with little money. But when Mary and Pam received a donation they invested in a pop-up food tent and equipment, which they took around the estates: cooking dinners for people and engaging them in conversation about what it’s like to be hungry, how to grow food sustainably and where to get it. In addition, community beekeeping is a must. A street called Honeyhole Road was the obvious location for their first beehives where people share equipment and responsibility for the care of bees.

Unhappy with the term “guerilla gardening” conjuring up images of war and macho behaviour, Mary and Pam prefer the term propaganda gardening as a way of introducing a whole new concept to people to help themselves to free food, instead of the landowners imperative: 'Don’t touch. Get off my land!'

There are now thirty-one Incredible Edible projects in the UK, and many others in Canada, an award winning scheme in Northern Ireland and a little island in Hong Kong is the latest. A valuable spin off for Todmorden is vegetable tourism. People visit all year round to look at the radical vegetable planting, so with the help from colleagues at Goldsmiths College, they have created Green Routes that direct people to shops selling local produce, to learning centres and to show gardens.

As well as reviving old skills such as bread and jam making and skinning rabbits, Todmorden is  building a permaculture training centre for appreticeships on land donated by a Yorkshire millionaire. This will complement a successful local cheese making business, egg producers, pig breeders and the Bear Cafe, which already employs a full time food grower.

Mary concludes, 'We’re not asking for money, we’re saying use your land and the people you have to support the Incredible Edible movement to find a kinder world. This is not about money, staff or empires. This is about the love of the planet.'

Photo of Mary Clear at the House of Commons (c) Sam Burcher 2012