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It’s Saturday morning at St Paul’s Churchyard in Stoke Newington, Hackney, and smallholder farmers have set up shop at Growing Communities’ weekly market, ready to sell their organic wares to the good people of London. July’s bounty is on full display: a glut of glossy aubergines, crimson plums, and every shade of tomato spills from trestle tables as customers queue to fill their tote bags.
Clusters of friends and neighbours chat over coffee, dogs meander between stalls, and wafts of freshly cooked gozleme scent the air. From the warmth with which market sellers greet their customers, it’s clear that many people have been coming here for a long time.
“We’ve been involved pretty much from the start, and the best thing about selling at this market every Saturday is getting to know our customers,” says Nicole, who is here selling grassfed, raw dairy products from Hook & Son farm in East Sussex. “We spend a lot of time and energy making our products, so it’s great to hear how important they are to customers, and learn why they shop from us week after week. I have so many new friends in London just from selling at this market.”
A few stalls down, Alison Bond, who operates a biodynamic smallholding in Essex, stands behind a stall of plump stone fruits, freshly baked cake, and jars of pale honey. “The farmers’ market has become my main outlet — it’s fantastic. I’m selling direct to the public at retail prices, but more importantly, I get to see how much people really appreciate the produce,” she says. “They’re getting a feel for the countryside. Last year, we had 53 customers come out on a coach trip to visit the farm. It’s great to share not just the food, but also the way it’s grown.”
The desire to bring Londoners closer to the people who grow their food was central to Julie Brown’s vision when founding Growing Communities over 30 years ago. What began as a partnership between a group of friends and a farm in Buckinghamshire in the 1990s has gradually developed into an alternative food system — one that reclaims power from supermarkets and agribusinesses, and delivers it into the hands of farmers and consumers.
The farmers’ market is just one piece of the puzzle: the organisation also operates a vegetable box scheme where members receive weekly bags of seasonal, organic produce directly from a network of smallholder farms, most within 60 miles of London. Farmers get 50% of the sale price of their produce when they sell via Growing Communities, more than three times what they get paid in supermarkets.
This scheme is bolstered with vegetables from Growing Communities’ own local growing sites in Hackney and Dagenham, where they provide training for new organic growers from the local area. To keep emissions low, veg boxes are delivered to a network of local businesses and community hubs throughout East London, where the majority of Londoners collect their parcels on bike or foot. As of this year, the scheme has expanded to deliver boxes from Brixton to Brockley in South London.
The idea is to reclaim the food system from excessive industrialisation and create an alternative model that brings sustainably grown food into cities, all the while paying farmers a fair wage. By facilitating subscriptions, the model provides farmers with reliable, regular payments and protects them from the volatility of conventional retail.
Smallholder farms like the ones that Growing Communities partners with have steadily disappeared from the UK over the past century — squeezed out by the high yields and low operating costs of industrial agriculture. Supermarkets have exacerbated the issue. Unfair practices such as delayed payments, last-minute order cancellations, and a relentless drive to source cheaper produce from overseas have left small-scale farmers unable to earn a sustainable living. “If Spain is offering them a penny cheaper than they can get in Britain, the supermarket will go to Spain and not worry about the British farmer,” says Fabienne Peckham from Galileo Farm, who sells organic high-welfare meat at the Saturday market.
As a result, many small farms have been forced to shut down and sell their land, often to property developers — land in England’s urban fringe is highly contested for housing and infrastructure. According to a report by The Countryside Charity, more than 1,700 farms on the outskirts of English towns and cities have vanished since 2010 alone, contributing to a growing threat to food security, reduced local resilience, and a decline in biodiversity.
The desire to build a more resilient, locally-forward alternative food system has become a matter of national priority since the Labour government came into office in 2024. In mid-July, the government shared its vision for a healthier, more sustainable food system with the publication of its Good Food Cycle Framework, developed in consultation with voices who already work with an alternative to the industrialised system. This framework sets out the government’s intention to create improved food environments in which nutritious, locally grown food is accessible and affordable for all, and it is a promising milestone in the development of a more equitable food system. Encouragingly, it places strong emphasis on supporting local producers, calling for shorter, fairer, and more transparent supply chains—core demands long championed by food justice advocates like Growing Communities.
But as it stands, it’s just a plan. With little detail on timelines or delivery, it remains unclear how and when the framework’s ambitions will be put into action. “The new Good Food Cycle objectives read like our core values — valuing people, land, and wildlife,” comments Richenda Wilson, marketing coordinator at Growing Communities. “They’re strong in spirit, but they lack teeth. Without legislation, they’re just hoping corporations will do the right thing, and history shows they won’t if profit is their only concern.” Whether this strategy becomes a turning point really depends on what happens next.
For Wilson, a genuine commitment to local and sustainable food begins with acknowledging that the two don’t always align. “The government has highlighted the need for more local food production, but this can be complicated. For example, you can grow tomatoes in the UK in April, but only with artificially heated greenhouses, which use a huge amount of energy. In that case, it’s probably more sustainable to import tomatoes from Spain, where they grow naturally without extra heat or light. I’d never support flying in herbs or beans from Senegal or Chile, but ultra-local isn’t always best—whereas sustainable almost always is.”
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The balance between local and sustainable food is at the heart of Growing Communities’ approach. While bringing food production closer to where people live and eat is a core aim, the organisation has developed a zoned sourcing model to ensure a steady supply throughout the year. The Growing Communities Food Zones model maps out what can be grown where. It prioritises produce from hyper-local and peri-urban areas before turning to farms further afield. In summer, veg boxes feature salad grown within Hackney, as well as tomatoes, beans, aubergines, and chillies from their Dagenham farm and other produce from nearby growers in Kent, Cambridgeshire, and East Anglia. While the goal is to source as locally as possible, some imports are necessary—especially during the UK’s “Hungry Gap,” a natural lull in food production during the early spring. In those cases, produce is carefully selected from organic European farms using low-carbon shipping. “The vision isn’t total self-sufficiency,” says Wilson. “It’s about growing what we can, as locally as we can.”
Schemes like Growing Communities offer a glimpse of what a better alternative food system can look like, yet these models struggle to compete in a market driven by low prices. For most people, food choices are shaped less by sustainability values and more by price. Recent research by The Food Foundation finds that, on average, healthier foods are more than twice as expensive per calorie as less healthy foods, with more nutritious food increasing in price at twice the rate in the past two years. Wilson highlights that while supermarkets may offer the illusion of affordability, the true costs are hidden: “if something’s cheap at the checkout, it usually means something or someone else has paid the price—maybe a chicken in a factory farm, a migrant worker exposed to toxic glyphosate or pesticides, or the degradation of the soil and the water that we all rely on.”
Despite Growing Communities’ efforts to shorten supply chains and lower prices, local and sustainably produced food remains the preserve of a select few, at a time when the number of local people experiencing hunger, for instance in Hackney, is at a record high. Growing Communities is involved in several community initiatives to make organic and sustainable food more accessible to all Hackney residents. One pilot — part of the national Bridging the Gap programme — supports local schools to cook healthier meals by supplying fresh, organic vegetables through the organisation’s wholesale arm.
However, initiatives like this can only go so far. To turn the government’s vision of sustainable, nutritious food for all into reality, more decisive action is needed at a regulatory level. Wilson argues that voluntary measures are not enough — without clear rules and enforcement, large retailers and food suppliers have little incentive to change long-standing practices that prioritise profit over fairness and sustainability. While there are no easy answers, campaign groups have proposed several approaches, including a tax on ultra-processed foods to generate funds for subsidising healthier options. One poll found that a majority of British people (58%) would support such a tax, with the proceeds going to tackle the obesity crisis. Wilson also proposes the introduction of a universal basic income, enabling people to afford the true cost of sustainably-grown food—reflecting the significant labour and environmental care involved in its production.
Growing Communities’ decades-long work highlights what’s possible at a grassroots level to produce a viable alternative to the industrialised food system. But for such models to thrive beyond small pockets, real change is needed at every level — and it can’t be left to consumers alone. The vision laid out in the Good Food Cycle Framework offers hope, but its promise will only be fulfilled if backed by legislation that protects farmers, supports communities, and holds Big Food to account. Until then, schemes like Growing Communities remain vital spaces where the future of food can be nurtured — one friendly conversation, one veg box, and one lettuce at a time.
