How do you bring a town together when there’s a busy main road running through the middle, and many of the people who live there work somewhere else?
For three years Incredible Edible Todmorden has been changing the look and reputation of a small market town by planting fruit and vegetables in public spaces, from leftover bits of council land to canalsides. Even the local police station has vegetables growing in raised beds in its front yard.
What started out as spontaneous ‘propaganda planting’ to encourage local people to grow their own food has now become a viral movement, with new Incredible Edibles sprouting across the country, from Accrington to the Isle of Wight. But Todmorden, at the end of the Calder Valley where Yorkshire meets Lancashire, is setting its sights higher.
A new ‘green route’ will join up the town, forming an edible circuit of the town centre. Taking in the Rochdale Canal, the Hippodrome Theatre, and the town’s indoor and outdoor markets, it will eventually provide more than 20 different points of interest for foodies and wildlife lovers.
These will include projects such as the Apothecary Garden at the local health centre and a canalside tea garden, and bee-friendly plantings designed to create new habitats to encourage pollinators.
As well as demonstrating the delights of local food, the green route will help to create a sense of place and character while celebrating historic assets such as the market and town hall. The hope is to support the town’s economy by encouraging people to shop locally, while enabling locals and visitors to learn about wider issues of sustainability and climate change.
The route has already been planned out with the help of designers from Pi Studio at Goldsmiths, University of London, who are hoping to study how the route can help change people’s attitudes and shopping habits. Earlier this summer new planters were installed along the canal and there’s more to come.
As Pam Warhurst, one of the founders of Incredible Edible Todmorden, put it last weekend, ‘This is about where you live and making your place kinder and stronger.’ You could call it designing for resilience.
• You can see more pictures of the green route taking shape here.
Thanks to Incredible Edible Todmorden for the picture.