There are plenty of farms in Britain that have recently found themselves under water. However, not many are actually under the water table.
But a new futuristic market garden, unveiled yesterday, lies a full 100 feet below ground. More than that, it sits under the streets of central London.
If that sounds bonkers, witnessing its beds of salads is even more bizarre. You have to enter, at street level, a building that houses the ventilation shaft for Clapham North Tube station and climb down 129 steps of a spiral staircase.
When you finally reach the bottom you are met with a series of enormous tunnels that have not been used since they served as bomb shelters during the Blitz. There are eight of these huge refuges dotted underneath the capital and most are used as storage facilities. This one, which covers 2.5 acres, has been empty since the war.
At the end of one of the long, ghostly tunnels, a supernatural pink glow emanates. This is the first test garden, which has been running for a few months as part of a commercial project called Growing Underground, backed by the television chef Michel Roux Jr.
It looks more like a laboratory than a greenhouse, Steve Dring, a former logistics director and co-founder of the enterprise, admits. “Everyone from the local council to Transport for London thinks we are doing a Breaking Bad,” he jokes, referring to the US show about a subterranean drugs factory. “I promise you, there is no crystal meth.”
The “farm” consists of table-height beds of hemp in which salads and herbs are being grown hydroponically. That means nutrient-rich water floods the beds once a day before being slowly drained away, with no soil involved in the process. Above each bed are strips of LED lights giving off the strange pink hue.
It looks fabulously visionary, but also highly flawed. How can a farm that relies on being artificially lit and heated all year round, and 100 feet below ground, be more cost-effective and environmentally sound than a polytunnel in a field, where you would normally find such crops?
Yet think again. Chris Nelson, a horticulturalist who is providing advice to the project, says: “With greenhouses you have to put in a lot of supplementary light and heat in the winter months, and glass is very expensive to heat. But technology has moved on considerably.”
Indeed, underground, the LEDs used give off just the right amount of heat to keep the tunnels at a comfortable 16 degrees Celsius (61 degrees Fahrenheit) all year round.
Richard Ballard, the project’s other co-founder, who used to work for a garden furniture company, estimates that their energy bill will be around £3,000 to £4,000 a month – about 50 per cent less than if they were growing the crops above ground in a greenhouse.
Indeed, they insist that there are clear reasons for farmers to shun the surface. Dring sees “three great advantages [to] being down here. It’s insulated, so we can keep the temperature stable; we can control the environment so there is no need for pesticides [he insists that rats do not like it this far down]; and it is about getting the local community involved.”
For their end customers are unlikely, at least initially, to be supermarkets. Instead, they are aiming for the wholesale market – New Covent Garden, the huge fruit and veg market, is less than two miles away. The other target will be high-end restaurants, often on the hunt for extra-fresh, niche local ingredients, which explains why Roux is involved as a backer and director.
Though only a small section of the tunnels are being used, by September the whole 2.5-acre site will be full of crops. “If we rented a warehouse on a brownfield site in London, it would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds a year,” says Ballard. “Transport for London is charging us tens of thousands of pounds.”
But many consumers like the idea that quality restaurants source their veg from walled kitchen gardens, I suggest to Roux. Could they not feel uncomfortable that their salads are being grown in a lab? The chef, who lives in south London, is only partially joking as he says: “This is my kitchen garden!” He goes on: “A lot of agriculture is not 'natural’. Look at forced rhubarb.”
Their crops are all pricey and faddish micro-salads – baby rocket, tiny pea shoots, miniature mustard cress, radish leaves – the sort of fussy vegetation that is currently scattered on almost any dish in a Michelin-starred restaurant. And both Dring and Ballard acknowledge that it is a serious risk that culinary fashions will change. They insist, however, that they are flexible and could change the crops in days.
There is no doubt that theirs is an intriguing project and one that might even make money. But only when they have fixed the lifts.
Carrying my legs back up 129 stairs – let alone a crate of food – was not fun.
From Telegraph.co.uk
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