Some of the most exciting ideas about the future of London are not really about London at all. They are about the fields, market gardens and farms that ring the city, and about the journeys people might make between the two. On a recent visit with the team from Granville Community Kitchen, we filmed a conversation on the edge of the capital, where one of those ideas is quietly taking root: a community farm built to belong to the people of South Kilburn.
You can watch the film below. Here is a little of the story behind it.
From a free kitchen to feeding a corner of London
Granville Community Kitchen was founded in 2014, in the building known as The Granville. When the cook who had been the heart of the community there retired, the kitchen sat empty, so two friends, both home educators, began doing what they called community building through food. Not catering, but salsa nights and film nights, Thursday lunches for the home education group, work experience for young people, and a space where adults with learning disabilities could learn kitchen and front of house skills. There was a community meal, and by 2015 a part time grower running volunteer sessions in the area. In 2016 the project won BBC Cook of the Year, which pushed everything forward.
Then March 2020 arrived. The volunteers running the community meal stopped coming, and almost overnight the kitchen turned itself into an emergency food operation. Within a couple of months it was the only organisation of its kind serving a huge stretch of London. At its peak the team was feeding around 1,500 people a week in something close to a military operation, with queues down the street and twelve drivers delivering everywhere from East Finchley to Harrow.
As the pandemic eased, the team made a deliberate choice. Handing out food indefinitely, they realised, risked creating dependency and quietly doing the government’s job, when the real answers lie in fair wages and proper support. So they scaled back to emergency food aid only, and launched something they had been planning all along: the Good Food Box, a weekly organic veg box with a three tier pricing system, so that people on very low incomes can still get access to genuinely good food. The emergency support has not disappeared. If anything it has become part of the mainstream, with referrals now coming from the Red Cross, GPs, adult social services and Citizens Advice.
Slow enough to last forever
This idea lived in Leslie and Dee’s heads for a very long time before serious work began, five or six years ago. It has been a long and bumpy road, in large part because the team knew from early on that a big vision needs real security. Too many community projects are handed a patch of land for a year and asked to work miracles on it. Granville wanted something they could invest in and build for the long term. After a lot of searching, they have found a landowner they genuinely trust, and are about to sign a 50 year lease, which is close to unheard of, alongside conversations about community ownership of the land itself. That instinct, that community spaces should at heart be owned by the community, runs right through everything Granville Community Kitchen does.
The vision keeps growing. A community hall, events, and more recently a campsite where people can stay overnight and cook on a fire, all the things that living in a dense city rarely leaves room for. But the pace is deliberately gentle. The recent visit brought ten or eleven people out to hear ideas and imagine what might be possible. Next year there might be more trips, a toilet, and somewhere dry to shelter if it rains. They will start on just one corner of the field. As the team put it, they want to pace themselves, so that they are here forever.
