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Meet the senior civil servant who gave it up to grow carrots

Sitopia is the brainchild of Chloë Dunnett, who has found her calling among the crops - Andrew Porter
Sitopia is the brainchild of Chloë Dunnett, who has found her calling among the crops - Andrew Porter

Chloë Dunnett found an old diary recently, written just after she’d graduated from university and was attending career fairs. In it, she wrote: “Really, I just want to be a farmer.” Two decades later, after a first career in international development and a second as a senior civil servant with roles in the Home and Cabinet Offices and the Ministry of Justice, she’s finally here, in wellies and a charity-shop Barbour jumper, surrounded by no-dig vegetable beds on what is now London’s largest inner-city horticultural farm.

The two-acre market garden in Shooters Hill, Greenwich has been built by a team of volunteers over the past year. They transformed a field that, until last March, was used as pasture for a few sheep and a Shetland pony called Bob. Right now there’s lots of spinach, chard and kale, stir-fry greens, sorrel, coriander and edible viola flowers. The radishes and pea shoots are coming up fast, as well as spring flowers: narcissi, tulips, anemones and ranunculus.

“We have been harvesting salad through the winter,” says Dunnett, 42, who seems slightly shell-shocked by how much they’ve achieved in just over a year.

The produce is mostly destined for local veg boxes, as well as the restaurant trade in London and the on-site farm shop. “We aim to do 100 veg bags and 50 bouquets for our weekly subscription scheme, as well as selling at our pop-up Saturday shop and to restaurants and local grocers and florists.”

The scope of Dunnett’s vision is even bigger. The veg boxes are offered at a 20 per cent discount to those on low incomes. “I could probably sell at a higher price to a certain demographic. But that’s not what this is about.”

The name Sitopia Farm was inspired by the book Sitopia by architect and author Carolyn Steel, which sought to explore how we can remake society’s broken relationship with food.

“At Sitopia Farm we want to see a world – in the UK and everywhere – in which good food is accessible to all, and by good I mean good for people and the planet,” says Dunnett.

Ironically, if she were to turn her production to solely flowers she’d make more money – seeing how we value flora over food.

“We’re here creating access to good food, but it’s hard enough making a living as a farmer. We need a system change,” she says. “I want to get this across that people can do this for a living, but it’s hard. You’re never going to make lots of money.”

Dunnett is more than aware that coming from a stable financial background has allowed her to take on this new challenge. She has savings, and a flat – albeit in Kentish Town, a three-hour round trip away.

As well as an MSc in food policy at City University, she completed an urban food growing traineeship with Growing Communities, worked on a 10-acre biodynamic farm in Herefordshire in the depths of winter (“to make sure I could really do it”) and completed courses at the likes of Trill Farm in east Devon. It was at the latter that she met Oliver Voss of Oxford Garden Farms. In his spare time he had set up a patchwork farm in people’s gardens, gathering enough land to start a veg box scheme.

“That got me thinking about growing food in the city,” says Dunnett. And so at the start of lockdown she identified a disused primary school ground near Hackney Downs that was overgrown with weeds and brambles.

“There was that feeling in lockdown that normal rules didn’t apply. I never had the illusion that my little patch was going to feed London, but it was something.”

Word spread, and volunteers poured in. “It became something important for a lot of people in lockdown. We turned this dilapidated land into a beautiful micro-farm.”

The plan was always to find something bigger, though. Dunnett put a board together, which academic Steel, a leading thinker on food and cities, agreed to be on, and spent her time scouring Google Earth for bits of spare land.

“There’s lots available in London but it’s mostly pasture or golf courses.”

And then she came across Woodlands, an 89-acre charity farm. Back in the 1990s a community action campaign was set up to save the area and neighbouring Oxleas Wood (an ancient woodland) from being destroyed to build a new dual carriageway, the East London River Crossing.

In 1993, the case went all the way to the High Court and Brussels, with National Lottery funding eventually secured in 1997 for the lease to be bought from the freeholder with the land to be used for agriculture. It is within Woodlands that Sitopia is now situated.

From a crowdfunder, Dunnett secured 400 backers, and with a Mayor’s grant agreeing to match funds she raised £77,000, “which covered a lot of our capital start-up costs”.

Roots rebel: Dunnett wants to show that growing food in urban spaces is doable - Andrew Potter
Roots rebel: Dunnett wants to show that growing food in urban spaces is doable - Andrew Potter

The biggest cost was £32,000 for the twin-bay polytunnel, of approximately 49ft x 98ft. Other costs were kept low thanks to what Dunnet calls a “circular” approach – encouraging the reuse of materials that often get thrown away.The 250 cubic tonnes of compost for the 50 beds was sourced from London’s green waste, and the wood chip to stop weeds from a local tree surgeon.

“Veolia were really helpful – they gave the compost to us for free, provided we paid the couple of thousand needed for haulage.”

As for the tree surgeon, it transpired that he often ended up paying to dump his wood chip. “Sometimes it even gets shipped to France and used as an eco product!”

In 2020 a study by the University of Sheffield found that growing fruit and vegetables in just 10 per cent of a city’s gardens and other urban green spaces could provide 15 per cent of the local population with their five-a-day.

“We want to prove you can – and should – grow more food in the city and we’re showing what you can do in a short space of time,” says Dunnett.

Volunteers have been instrumental in getting the project off the ground, attracting a diverse mix of people from the local area – from people on universal credit to those working in the City and everyone in between, Dunnett says.

She also employs a “farmitect”, Alice Holden, the head grower at Growing Communities’ Dagenham Farm, who has helped design and implement Sitopia Farm.

Together they’ve launched a three-day vegetable- and flower-growing course, hosted by Dunnett and Holden, spread over spring, summer and autumn.

She’s also keen to do more corporate volunteer days. “Partly because we need people working in banks and corporate law firms to understand these things, too. And it also helps us to fund the discounted veg boxes.”

However it’s important, she says, that Sitopia isn’t a charity, but a social enterprise, saying: “Often, farms are run as charities where the focus is on education rather than food production.”

Dunnett gets a kick out of surprising people by what’s grown there. “My favourite comment was from someone who came and asked, ‘What’s all this then? Where’s it all from?’ And I pointed and said, ‘There!’ They said, ‘No! But those flowers look too exotic,’” laughs Dunnett.

“Another came with her shopping bag and said ‘I didn’t go to Sainsbury’s this week because I heard about you. What have you got?’ I offered her some lovely kale and she said, ‘No, I want proper veg, not this leafy green s---!’ Luckily we had ‘proper’ veg too.”

The situation in Ukraine hasn’t so much changed her thoughts on food resilience and security as redoubled her focus.

“Food security and food poverty have been serious issues for the UK (as elsewhere) for a long time, though it’s not been sufficiently acknowledged nor acted upon by the Government and has been exacerbated by Covid and Ukraine.”

She cites the 2018 UN report on food poverty, which said it was on the rise, but feels despondent that the UK Government has only just started to measure food poverty at all.

“Covid and Ukraine have both served to highlight the fragility of our just-in-time supply systems that rely on us in the UK being able to import food from elsewhere, to say nothing about the environmental impacts of doing so or the impact on prices, health and nutrition.”

 Bedding down: Sitopia Farm was built by a team of volunteers and sits on two acres in London’s Greenwich - Andrew Porter
 Bedding down: Sitopia Farm was built by a team of volunteers and sits on two acres in London’s Greenwich - Andrew Porter

She would love to see more initiatives like hers. Already two of her volunteers have been inspired to go off and seek their own fortune (not literally, of course) setting up their own market garden farm. And while veg boxes have increased in popularity they’re still only a fraction of the market.

Foremost though, Dunnett says we need a government food strategy. “Currently we don’t actually have one – believe it or not – despite various government-commissioned reports over the years calling for one, the latest being by Henry Dimbleby.”

Top of that strategy would be food waste. Eating less and better meat, so we can reduce the amount of land and crops grown purely to feed animals in a very inefficient way. “We also need to revisit our reliance on (and tariff system for) trade imports and reinvest in more ecologically-friendly food production in the UK.

“We need coherent policies which reduce the price of healthier, environmentally-friendly foods and increase the price of unhealthy, environmentally-damaging foods. As well as, of course, proper living wages for all.”

She’s compelling on the subject, not least because of her background in policy.

“Ultimately, as Sitopia Farm develops, the plan is to work closely with the Woodlands Farm Trust to protect and enhance their wider 89 acres and develop a sustainable food, farming and educational hub on the land for London as a whole,” she explains.

We’ve been nibbling our way around the beds, including a mandala of veg beds inspired by being so close to the Greenwich Meridian. It’s remarkable how much flavour there is in the food Sitopia Farm is producing. It makes you realise how much tastier it would be if we prioritised soil health and taste over higher yields and varieties that can withstand air freight. So many of us today are overfed and undernourished.

“People say, ‘I can’t believe cucumbers taste like that.’ Another thing I hear is how sweet our tomatoes are.”

Later Dunnett will be back on the bus and Tube, home to Kentish Town, face and boots mud-spattered. Not your typical commuter. But wouldn’t it be nice if there were a few more like her?