First round of Lambeth Grassroutes cycle tour

Being based in Lambeth we’re lucky to have many exciting community food-growing
and Transition Town Brixton projects on our doorstep. For some time now, Social
Landscapes has been developing the idea of a bike tour to raise awareness of these
projects, tell the stories of the people behind them and get people thinking differently
about city living.

In October we finally put the idea to the test. We designed a route (using permaculture principles, of course!) and recruited a lovely bunch of willing guinea pigs to take part in the first ever Lambeth Grassroutes Tour. Keeping mainly to quiet roads and parks we visited a range of different projects:

• Bandstand Beds, The Kerb Garden, Loughborough Farm and Brockwell Community Greenhouses gave us a taste of community-led farms and gardens. Each has its own approach and personality but all of them bring people together to grow food and their local communities.

• The Library of Things is developing a lively sharing economy in West Norwood, reducing waste and challenging some of the basic assumptions of consumer society.

• We bumped into a Community Freshview workshop where a group of neighbours were working together to make planters and brighten up their street.

• The Brixton Pound Café makes all its meals from surplus food and, of course, accepts Brixton Pounds, our local complementary currency.

Overall, it was a busy day with lots of opportunities to meet new people, discover
new places and explore new ideas. We’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who
took part and to the volunteers from the projects who gave up their time to show us
around. Special thanks to Charlotte at Loughborough Farm and the Platform Cafe for providing us with a delicious vegan lunch.

The feedback so far has been really positive and at least one person who joined us
on the tour has gone back to Loughborough Farm to join their regular volunteer
sessions.

We hope to run more tours in 2018 so watch this space if you’d like to get involved.

Here is a video on Bandstand Beds produced by Alexia, who was interning for Social Landscapes. We hope to produce more material on the projects we are visiting to help promote their great work.