Incredible Northern Greenhouse

Year | 2015

Location | The North of England, UK

Clients | Pam Warhurst

For six weeks, the Incredible Northern Greenhouse (ING) team worked with various key stakeholders to produce a strategy document that outlined how the ING vision could be realised. The Incredible Northern Greenhouse is the next step for the Incredible Edible Network. Co-founded by our main client, Pam Warhurst, in 2008, Incredible Edible began as a grassroots movement in Todmorden. It is a food partnership that engages the local community to participate in sustainable food growing initiatives. Using the ‘three plates’: Community, Learning and Business, Incredible Edible outlines how communities could run themselves in order to be more resilient and promote well-being. Although Incredible Edible started small, the network now spans across groups who are based all across the UK and around the world.

The culmination of this intensive period of work resulted in a strategy document for Incredible Edible. Along with this, we produced an animation to gain interest and a verbal presentation which we will be giving at the Incredible Edible Network conference, Growing Incredible Futures Together, on the 20th of November 2015. The document looks at the Incredible Northern Greenhouse across three scales: regional, citywide and site specific. Regionally, the ambition is to link up northern cities and smaller towns across England from Liverpool to Hull, on a city level we looked at three main areas – Eureka! Children’s Museum and Nestlé in Halifax, and Thornton Estate and HMP Humber Prison in Hull . We researched potential collaborators, structures and funding streams and suggested site-specific interventions on each location.

Throughout the project, the team gained invaluable experience and insight into collaboration with an expansive amount of stakeholders, locally and regionally. From the requirements of the brief, we learnt the skills necessary to deconstruct and explain a complicated network of people and organisations through graphical representation and writing. This was key to our initial understanding of the project and helped us explore and apply creativity to the task of strategizing the future for this vast and potentially influential network. In addition, we developed skills needed as architects, illustrating the process through imagery, text and animation, making it extremely accessible to anybody. This was a truly incredible experience for us and our client, and the material we produced will be used to further this incredible cause.