Hawkesbury River

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Staying on the Hawkesbury just north of Sydney for 6 weeks in a water access only house – like many other people up here who live without car access. Here, it’s just taken for granted and not questioned or thought of as odd – in the UK, at Moonshine, we are constantly bombarded with incredulous comments about not being able to drive to the house…  In this landscape – the Hawkesbury – there is a thriving self build community, and whilst individually they are nothing special, what is interesting is just how sensitive they are to the bushland in which they sit – absolutely no cut and fill, ever; no trees cut down, ever – and thus this landscape appears to be able to take development. In the UK, unquestionably, virgin sites are ruined whenever people build – seemingly, not here.

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122 Leadenhall Street City Farm

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Mitchell Taylor Workshop’s polemical city farm project on the site of the RRP designed ‘Cheesegrater’ on Leadenhall Street in the City of London featured in new book on Urban Agriculture – Here: 82_Carrot_City_Leadenhall_low

Summary of Presentation at Architecture Centre:
Mitchell Taylor Workshop’s proposal for a temporary use of the ‘cheese grater’ development site (in the City’s Leadenhall Street), offered an innovative and cost-effective solution for keeping a large, empty site vibrant. This exciting proposal could be adopted as a model for other disused sites across the UK. This session involved a presentation by Piers Taylor of Mitchell Taylor Workshop, in conversation with Gillian Fearnyough, Director of The Architecture Centre, Bristol.

Click here to hear a podcast of this talk.

Q&A session:
Discussions ranged from whether the responsibility for local food production lies with the consumer or supermarkets; weaving supermarkets and shops into the fabric of cities rather than placing them at city edges; retrofitting existing buildings to allow food production; whether change would be more sustainable at a personal scale (e.g. families with small allotments) or at a community scale (e.g. shared growing spaces); how best built environment advocates and educators can engage in this debate.

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