A Movable Feast in London: King's Cross Skip Garden

Behind this wall is a food garden. The Skip Garden in King's Cross is a unique solution to a common problem. Unusable construction space waiting for renewal in a big urban centre.Walking back from Alara Foods and my tour of the urban vineyard planted last year central London, I noticed some hoarding around a building site directly across the street from the St. Pancras train station. (King's Cross is home to Europe's biggest building site as a major urban renewal push is on in this part of London -- 67 acres in King's Cross to be rebuilt by 2020 -- so construction sites are everywhere.)

But my urban ag senses were tingling. Maybe it was this sign that caught my attention:

For obvious reasons, I started poking around. Sure enough, there were large construction rubbish bins (these are skips as I soon learned) overflowing with veggies and even fruit trees and trailing strawberries.

Even though it looked like the staff were scurrying out (it was the end of the day) I waved down a young guy who immediatedly motioned for me to come into the lot. Bert had just finished with a workshop for 10 to 12 Guardian newspaper employees. The Guardian is a supporter of this project and it was felt that they really needed to get their hands dirty to walk the walk of sustainability.

Bert explained that this site just celebrated its 1 year (plus 2 months) anniversary, and they brought over 400 school kids through the site. Bert and his colleagues at Global Generation, the London-based charity that runs this skip garden plus other sustainable urban agriculture sites on the 67-acre redevelopment area, use the site to educate kids and adults about sustainable food growing and waste reduction. Because the various sites will be redeveloped at some point in the years leading up to 2020, the idea of the skip garden came about as a way to create totally mobile food growing spaces. When a site needs to be vacated, the skips can simply be transported to a new site. The trees and plants in the skips will eventually be moved to rooftop food gardens as new buildings are completed.

There are several skips, all demonstrating various aspects of a sustainable food production space. There's the permanent orchard of five apple trees, two pears, two grapevines, other soft fruit and even cascading alpine strawberries from this skip. The soil in it is a mere 30 cm deep. Bert says that they harvested 20 to 30 apples in this first year.

Three skips are used for the crop rotation demonstrations. They are producing everything from corn and lettuces, to parsnips and broad beans and even flowers. They are planted intensively and the crop rotation keeps them producing at maximum capacity.

There's a mobile trailer with a covered plastic dome. The herbs inside are grown and the idea is that the wagon can be pulled to chefs who wish to buy fresh lettuces and herbs. The chefs can simply harvest the exact amounts of greenery right from the mobile greens cart.

The mobile lettuce and herb wagonA crop rotation skip, currently planted with beets

Lastly, there's the "Green Engine" or the wormery skip. There are three "wormeries" and a "worm café" I am told that is used for demonstration purposes. There's a window box planted with comfrey, which is cut and pounded through a PVC weeping tile tube to produce the vile-smelling but ultra nutrient-rich comfrey juice that is a highly effective fertilizer.

Paul Richens, site manager for Global Generation and rooftop farm consultant, joins Bert and me. This is really his baby. "This is an excercise in gardening in difficult places," he tells me. "This is quintessentially urban agriculture. You don't get anymore urban than this," he says as cranes rotate overhead and an ambulance wheezes by. "It's acutally about using a space that is unusable."

As it turns out, there's a lot of this unusable space within the 67-acre construction zone and Global Generation has several garden sites supplying fresh food to various restaurants in the London core, and teaching a new generation of kids to grow their own food regardless of access to suitable land and spaces.

Update on Monday, October 18, 2010 at 10:19PM by Jennifer CK

Here's a good link to a story in the Guardian. The five-minute movie clip gives a good overview and more visuals of the Skip Garden.