Last year we trialled the Big Grow project at three sites in Norwich city centre: Colegate Church, St Giles’ Church and the New Routes charity shop. The harvest varied from place to place, but the community spirit did not. At every site there was the same joy, pride and sense of achievement in growing food together.
It also created a natural environment for difficult issues to surface, such as the chronic lack of access to NHS dental care in the city. That’s where Norwich Charitable Trusts helped take the project to another level. Their funding enabled us to hold four outreach mobile dental clinics treating 27 people, including former Big Issue vendor Simon, who is now lead grower with Big Grow. The clinics delivered 130 dental procedures, including 31 tooth extractions, as well as oral health assessments, oral cancer screenings, fillings, fluoride varnish applications and oral hygiene.
There is something quietly life-affirming about growing food. Put seed, soil, sun and water together, add patience and care, and something useful appears. This matters at a time when record-breaking hot summers and low rainfall are raising difficult questions about food prices, availability and resilience. So positive, practical stories about food growing are not a distraction from the problem. They are part of the answer.
Development expert Hugh Locke offers useful context in his new book Whole Earth Farming. He argues that helping half of the world’s smallholder farmers – around 240 million – to adopt regenerative agriculture and agroforestry could produce the additional food needed for population growth by 2050 while restoring, rather than exhausting, the natural world.
His work with the Smallholder Farmers Alliance in Haiti shows what that can mean in practice: greater yields and household incomes alongside tree planting and healthier land. The point is not that Norwich can copy a Haitian farming model, but that growing food can strengthen people, places and the environment at the same time.
This year, the Big Grow has taken root somewhere new. We’ve been working with students at Jane Austen School in Norwich to begin a food-growing project of their own. The school has no green space and sits opposite Colegate Church. One student in particular, Tatiana Hardy, watched with curiosity as the original Big Grow planters appeared at Colegate Church and a garden flourished across the road.
