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For Jeremy Iles, director of the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens, the loss of such local networks is part of a general dislocation of town dwellers from the food growing process. "Even until relatively recently, the average family garden had a vegetable plot," he says. "But the austerity of rationing with which a past generation grew up was replaced by consumer confidence in supermarket culture from the Sixties. It displaced the knowledge and commitment to grow our own food."
Elsewhere in the world, growing in cities, particularly in developing countries with less sophisticated food supply chains, remains important. Berlin has 80,000 community gardeners on municipal land. And, after Cuba's intensive agricultural system crashed along with the fall of the Soviet Union, thousands of volunteer urban growers in Havana started to raise crops everywhere from plots to balconies and rooftops, transforming food production. More than half the country's fresh vegetables now come from the capital.
Britain's agricultural system is not yet on the point of collapse, but our price-conscious retail culture is increasingly dependent on imports. A world energy crisis could lead to food shortages in the capital within weeks. But while the public is increasingly plugged into environmental issues, is it ready to embrace something so back-to-basics as part-time growers in small city farms and community gardens?
Jeremy Iles believes millions of people are already involved in growing of some description. The federation is running an Allotments Regeneration Initiative, which aims to give them a more upbeat image. According to Iles, alongside traditional "one person" allotments, many large plots are now subdivided into smaller ones more manageable for today's busy lifestyles. Then there are the collectives, such as the Bristol community group that has adopted six disused plots to plant old varieties of apples and pears.
The biggest detectable change, he says, is that more young families and women are becoming involved. And there seems to be an upsurge in interest in urban gardens or city farms "where land is available."
And there is the snag. Julie Brown's Growing Communities leased a plot for several years and lovingly nurturing its organic soils, only to have it snatched away for housing development. Shouldn't councils be doing more to make land available for urban growing?
Definitely, says Iles. "Planning guidelines have a baseline of what must be provided in shops, playing fields, schools and pubs, but nothing about how much land should be set aside for allotments, community gardens or city farms."
Julie Brown agrees. Most of the plots that her group manages were discovered by her cycling around peering over
hedges and fences at derelict bits of land, and knocking on doors to inquire about ownership.
There's a radical urgency about her project that deserves to succeed. But the issue of urban farms and gardens, and the failure of London to fully explore their potential, reminds us that if city dwellers are to embrace food sustainability, we need to make more space for growing it amid the concrete.
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