Vegetables outside the police station
What happened when a few people in a Yorkshire town started planting food in public, mostly without asking.
By Oliver, EveryVillage
In 2008 Pam Warhurst, Mary Clear and a handful of others in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, began planting vegetables and herbs in the public spaces around the town rather than on allotments, on the verges, the raised beds, the scruffy bits of ground nobody had a plan for, and the patches outside the health centre and the police station.
Anyone could take what they wanted, with no membership, no committee to join and nothing to apply for. They called them propaganda gardens, on the grounds that the point was less the food itself than the reminder that food can be grown fifty yards from your own front door.
A good deal of the planting was done without permission and the town let them get on with it. Incredible Edible has since grown to around a hundred and twenty groups in the UK and more than seven hundred worldwide.
What makes it worth retelling is how little it needed to start. No funding round, no planning application and nobody's blessing. A few people decided that the strip between the pavement and the wall could be something, and then did it where everyone could see.