As an industrial town with no industry, the Yorkshire town of Todmorden didn’t have much going for it. But in 2008, friends Mary Clear and Pam Warhurst decided to take action against climate change and food insecurity, and their actions have transformed the community. Three years on, Clear reflects on how it all began: “We were having a conversation about the lack of leadership on the environment, both locally and nationally. It’s so easy to criticise lack of leadership and be a victim, to think that it’s somebody else’s responsibility. Rather than just be victims and blame someone else, we thought: ‘Well, we’ll try and make a difference ourselves’.”

So, Clear and Warhurst took out an advert in the local paper that said: ‘We’re worried about the future for our children. We’re worried about the environment, food security and the future of the planet. Is there anyone who shares our view?’ They invited all concerned to attend a meeting, modestly hoping to attract five like-minded individuals; to their surprise, 60 people showed up and Incredible Edible Todmorden (IET) was born.

“We knew that instead of whingeing on about there being nowhere to grow, that there are long allotment lists and laws need changing, that we should just take some direct action”, says Clear. Having discussed ways to approach their concerns, people began planting a few herb gardens throughout the town.

This simple step led to others and now the project has virtually taken over Todmorden; participants in the project grow edible produce in every piece of available space – from outside the police station to bus stop beds and even in graveyards. “There’s virtually no land available in this steep-sided valley – this isn’t a Garden of Eden – so we have to be creative with the tiny little patches we can get”, Clear explains.

With hours of voluntary labour given by some of the 15,000 Todmorden residents, work has now evolved into vegetable plots, orchards and, fundamentally, educating the community through food-based learning. Clear sees food as their ‘Trojan Horse’, “a way of engaging people about the environment”. Indeed, as food is necessarily part of everyone’s life, the Incredible Edible project affects all people; the group’s membership is a simple statement that reflects this fact: ‘If you eat, you’re in.’
Having planted over all the land the town has to offer, the project has evolved further. Elements of the IET project now include the ‘Every Egg Matters’ campaign, with the aim of ensuring every egg eaten in Todmorden is laid in Todmorden, and the ‘Bee Credible’ project that aims to treble the number of hives in the town and enable learning about the life cycle of the bee. Children are at the heart of the project, according to Clear, and so every school in the town is involved in some sort of food growing project, and food education, as well as opportunities to see where it all comes from, abound.

Not content to rest on their laurels, though (“We’re still carrying on and developing; we’ve always got something else that we’ve got in the bag”, chirps Clear), the folks at IET are currently planning to create a garden to run alongside the canal. And it’s not just physical growing the group gets involved with; IET, which has always had a good relationship with its local authority, according to Clear, is also campaigning for a policy change to ensure that all social housing, as well as hospitals and schools, have a place for people to grow produce.

Over time, local businessmen have also donated larger pieces of land and so the project has been able to branch out into greenfield sites: volunteers have created a five-acre growing plot in the nearby village of Walsden, set to include a polytunnel, ponds and beds, as well as a hill-top farming site, based in the area of Gorpley – both with a view to educating community members in growing on a larger scale.

With no core funding, IET members have had to raise funds themselves, which has become easier with the success of grant applications. Having secured money from the LEADER Grants Programme, two part-time ‘Food Inspirers’ are now employed to smooth the running of the programme, organise events, and pass on knowledge. The project also recently received nearly £500,000 from the Big Lottery for its high school food hub.

Indeed, collaboration with schools has been a big part of the project to date, and thanks to the Lottery funding, Todmorden High School will build a state-of-the-art fish farm hub. It will allow students to learn about production of fish and salad leaves and will further encourage the children to appreciate locally produced food.

But, as with most places, large retail interests are at odds with local values. “There are planning applications in for two huge supermarkets to come here”, says Clear, highlighting a potential threat to the project. With a well-established, six-day-a-week market, however, she feels that the locals will stay loyal.

And she has good reason to feel this way, as the project has utterly transformed the town, giving the locals “a sense of pride, a sense of place” and improving the lives of residents. “We certainly know that we now have a lot less vandalism in the town because there’s more and more people out gardening and none of our food or our orchards have been destroyed”, Clear explains. Not only that, but thinking about food gets people thinking about a whole host of other environmental issues, according to Clear: “Once people get involved in Incredible Edible, they take on a whole agenda of waste, recycling, using things/looking at things differently.”

Todmorden is well on its way to self-sufficiency and its progress may seem phenomenal, but Clear suggests others can easily replicate its success. “There’s no town where it couldn’t happen”, says Clear, indicating IET is happy to pass on its knowledge and show people how to kick start their own movement. ‘Vegetable tourism’ has become quite popular in the town with visitors coming from far and wide to see what the project has achieved and, once a month, IET offers tours to help others join the local food movement. “Nine out of 10 people leave here saying ‘Well, we’ll go and do something in our town’, and that’s what really gives us the energy to keep going”, Clear claims. The ‘grow your community’s own’ competition starts here.