Urban Agriculture Tour of Edible Hackney

The Edible Map of Hackney by Mikey Tomkins. “You Are Hungry: Mapping An Edible Urban Hackney” investigates how much food can be grown on 25 hectares of south Hackney. Complete map here.

More and more people are finding imaginative places for growing food in urban environments

By Edward Platt
The Guardian
1 September 2011

Excerpt:

The map offers a beguiling vision of a district recently ravaged by riots, and yet it isn’t entirely wishful thinking. When Tomkins had greeted our small group half an hour before with a pot of his London Fields honey, he had explained that the tour we were about to embark on would not only take in the places where food might be produced, but the places where it was already in production.

Our first stop was a garden that Tomkins described as an oasis, at the back of a low-rise block of flats on the Warburton and Darcy Estate, between Mare Street and London Fields. It is overlooked on three sides by windows, but sunflowers the size of the satellite dishes bloom in the flowerbeds around its edges, and elsewhere, there are beans, tomatoes, spinach, artichokes, potatoes, and a wide variety of herbs. Weeks before, the plum trees beside the gate had been dripping fruit.

Read the complete article here.