If you ever find yourself spying an underused piece of land, which seems to be sitting idly with no obvious use, and wondered how it might be posssible to go about putting it into productive use, then you should be interested in Capital Growth.
This is the now-Boris-endorsed project to create 2,012 new food growing spaces in London by 2012. Not only that, it aims to harness your musings about those odd unused nooks, crannies, parcels, patches, corners and strips of land. Capital Growth offers, if you get in touch, to do the legwork of identifying the owners of the land and then embarking on the negotiations about how to put the land into community use for food-growing.
(Personally, I've got two in mind: That strange, fenced, concrete strip on the corner of Westcombe Hill and Humber Road - could we have a builders' bag food garden there? And Ingleside Gardens in the Beaconsfield / Hardy Road triangle: it's currently used for little more than late-night dog walkers taking Fido out for a last call of nature.)
They also have a pot of funding totalling £50,000 (possibly to rise) for making small grants to help create these spaces. One Transition Westcombe member has been in touch to supply us with the application form (email to request it if you wish), and to ponder whether part of the land at Mycenae House could be used for food-growing and whether these grants could be accessed for that.
One for discussion and debate, perhaps, at Transition Drinks on 25 February. See you there.
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