Dave Richards, coordinator of 'Food4families', a community food growing programme at Reading International Development Centre, shares his thoughts on how communal outdoor spaces help strengthen communities. 

"It’s probably in the nature of gardeners to be positive and live in hope; after all the dead of winter always gives way to the joys of spring and the harvests of summer and autumn. 

For community food growers a silver lining of Covid was that it provided further evidence of the importance of green spaces and access to nature to maintaining health and wellbeing. In Reading our gardens were one of the few places you could legally congregate, plant, weed, harvest and chat, albeit socially distanced with disinfected tools. 

Our largest site, Lavender Place Community Garden (pictured) in the centre of town, became a showcase vibrant, impromptu community hub. New volunteers helped us increase the area cultivated, and supplied community kitchens with fresh fruit and veg to cook for refugees and homeless people without access to a kitchen. Our group of elderly Nepalese retired Gurkha veterans and their families were able to find respite from social isolation. 

Local artists discovered a new venue for the creative arts. Sculptor Andrew Hood erected an awning for a stone carving workshop that drew curious passers-by and resulted in a collective monument to community resilience made from recycled stone by our volunteers. Knitters congregated in the pergola under a canopy of grapes and hops. During the summer holidays Kommando Jugendstil, a solarpunk art collective, ran kids’ workshops exploring ways to live more sustainably. 

The benefits of community food growing for community resilience were captured in a ‘Digital Stories’ project coordinated by the Open University and participatory video experts, the Cobra Collective. Community gardeners from across the country were trained to make short videos reflecting on how the opportunity to grow food with other people transformed lives. Post-pandemic, our experience of the value of public spaces that encourage a range of outdoor activities has informed our work. With fellow members of Reading Green Wellbeing Network we successfully developed a package of activities that combined gardening with wild nature walks and the creative arts. 

This has become our model for all the new gardens we develop with schools, community and faith groups. Under the banner of Incredible Edible Reading we are pushing policy makers and developers to embrace this new approach to the public realm, particularly the creation of an edible urban landscape that supports the development of thriving communities. Several of Reading’s re-generation projects include community gardens in their proposals. 

Our Creative Gardens project, funded by Creative Lives and Reading Borough Council, gives us the opportunity to develop a toolkit of outdoor arts activities that use the inspiration of nature and the experience of growing, harvesting and eating to enrich our lives – to break down barriers between cultures, promote a better understanding of the importance of living within the planet’s limits and enhance wellbeing."

You can reach Dave at [email protected]