What a five year project in Tower Hamlets shows us about building resilient city food systems

This post is by Elle McAll, Just FACT programme manager at Wen (Women’s Environmental Network). 

The UK imports 64 per cent of its fruit and vegetables from regions vulnerable to climate shocks. Food security is a major challenge. We’re already seeing climate impacts on supply chains and food prices, with those struggling the most bearing the cost. In coming decades, local issues of extreme heat and cold, air pollution, flooding and vulnerable food supply chains will threaten our health and stability. 

As the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) develops a new UK food strategy and considers last year’s Just in case recommendations on civil food resilience, it should look at who can build this resilience and how. This is especially important in highly urban places where food production and community infrastructure are often overlooked. 

The Just Food and Climate Transition (Just FACT) programme, which has just published its final report, offers tangible and replicable examples of how resilience can be built from the ground up, focusing on one London borough. 

This was a partnership initiative in Tower Hamlets, co-ordinated by Wen (Women’s Environmental Network) and funded by The National Lottery Community Fund (TNLCF)’s Climate Action Fund. Over the past five years, 26 groups and organisations worked together, building and experimenting with ways to achieve a fairer food system in the face of climate challenges. 

The programme demonstrated the potential of grassroots food projects: from community stewarded food hubs operating closed loop systems, to peri-urban farms growing culturally appropriate fruit and vegetables. It has shown that community food infrastructure is not a nice to have but an essential component of civil resilience, and is a policy opportunity hiding in plain sight. 

What we learned in Tower Hamlets
We have learnt that there is significant untapped potential for urban food growing, that community food infrastructure is a vital resource, and that it’s possible to create decentralised supply chains that meet local need. 

Just FACT demonstrated that there are many possible growing spaces, from rooftops to disused garages, even private back gardens. Demand for growing spaces in the borough of Tower Hamlets is huge. A Right to Grow is needed for home growing to reach its full potential, providing a mechanism to identify growing spaces and to organise residents’ access to land. 

Home growing builds resilience in the face of shortages, but it also means residents supplement their diets with fresh fruit and vegetables, improving their health and wellbeing, often deepening community connection and improving local biodiversity as well. 

Community food assets need to be recognised
Through this project we learnt the value of places where residents can grow, cook and eat together. At community food hubs residents saved energy, reduced waste and practised collective habits like composting and recycling. 

Food hubs can also host extra infrastructure and technology. Micro anaerobic digesters (Micro AD) transform food waste from estates and schools into energy to power community kitchens and even saunas. Its by-products, such as compost and fertiliser, can be used by residents. 

Hubs also offer places for communities to make sense of and organise in the face of climate change. These assets remain largely unmapped and underused but should be at the heart of resilience planning. 

Supply chains should be decentralised
Just FACT piloted alternatives to the centralised, supermarket-dominated food system, to show how a new grassroots food economy could work. Food co-ops were supplied with organic produce by Folx Farm in Sussex and the Better Food Shed. Both have business models that offer growers fair pay. Folx Farm’s FAF (Food Access Fund) works with corporate partners to redistribute wealth in the London food industry, and support residents to access fresh, culturally relevant and affordable veg. The food co-op accepts Alexandra Rose vouchers, charity vouchers given to local families to help them afford fresh fruit and vegetables. 

Local people, particularly those who face barriers to employment in the food sector, have taken up jobs in the co-ops and farms. Their leadership is helping to create spaces where everyone feels welcome and can participate fully. The money earned flows into the local economy, as they live and buy locally. 

It’s a policy opportunity hiding in plain sight
The Just in case report argued for a food system capable of absorbing shocks, whether from climate impacts, geopolitical instability or economic stress. Just FACT is providing real world evidence of what this looks like. 

If the government is serious about preparedness and food security, it must move beyond contingency planning that focuses solely on national supply chains. Resilience should also be social and local. 

Urban food growing and community food infrastructure should be seen as vital infrastructure to strengthen national food security, sustainability and resilience. 

As Defra considers how to deliver its food strategy ambitions, there’s an opportunity to reframe community food organisations as essential infrastructure that requires recognition and investment, not as marginal actors. 

For policy makers, the question is no longer whether these assets matter, but whether we can afford to ignore them. The examples from Tower Hamlets show what’s possible when we don’t. 

You can find out more about the Just FACT programme and read the report. Photography credits to Sarah Ainslie and Wen/ Just FACT.