‘Unstoppable’: Sustainable food school marks milestone growth

Mayor Woodley opens the new garden room. Photograph: Pau Ros

A sustainable food school is celebrating the opening of its new garden classroom, furthering its goal to provide a ‘seed to spoon’ education for all of the borough’s children.

Last Thursday, the non-profit Hackney School of Food (HSF), which sits in the grounds of Clapton’s Mandeville Primary School, officially launched its new garden room.

Built from the rubble of an old playground area, the project has blossomed into a “fully productive” community hub, where visitors find themselves surrounded by a fruit orchard, vegetable garden, chickens and bees.

Flanked by Mandeville school pupils and her cabinet members Anntoinette Bramble and Sarah Young – plus some feathered friends – Mayor of Hackney Caroline Woodley cut the ribbon on the new facility and joined one of its first food lessons.

Thanking the children for their involvement, Woodley dubbed them “ambassadors for a green and growing Hackney”.

Eight-year-old Mandeville pupil, Ariam, said: “We can help all the bees and pollinators, and my favourite thing to do is feed the chickens.”

First set up in 2020, HSF was spearheaded by Louise Nichols, who is executive head of Mandeville and two other schools comprising the LEAP federation.

Previously, alongside Ottolenghi veteran Nicole Pisani and LEON co-founder Henry Dimbleby, Nichols had launched the award-winning national charity, Chefs in Schools, which placed restaurant-level chefs into children’s classrooms with the aim of changing the culture around school meals.

When Clapton’s Mandeville Primary joined the federation in 2017, the trust was bestowed with a souvenir from the old school building: a defunct caretaker house which legally needed to have an educational purpose for it to be converted.

The project’s seeds were sown when organisers spied a gap in training opportunities for school kitchen staff, “often undervalued and lacking professional development”, which could in turn help efforts to shift the conversation around food.

“We’re in a very deprived corner of Hackney. We wanted to make sure the children who live in this area had access somewhere that they could see things growing and understand the journey of food production,” Nichols said.

Mandeville pupils enjoy the new space. Photograph: Pau Ros

After years of fundraising, by 2020, HSF had secured grants to help turn a “stretch of tarmac into a vibrant garden” and convert the former premises manager’s lodge into a teaching kitchen.

In February that year, construction had completed – but then came lockdown restrictions, putting activities on hold.

During the pandemic, the space became a “rare and vital refuge” for Hackney residents, while volunteers came together to help build this urban food haven.

In the years since, HSF became a community interest company (CIC) and won backing from the local authority, which provided funding for all of the borough’s year 3 pupils to access its food classes.

“It was brilliant for those children,” said Mandeville’s headteacher, Marc Thompson, who is keen to make this flavour of education “a mainstay of the life experience of a happy pupil”.

General manager, Zoë McIntyre, said: “The creativity of cooking and having the right nutrients are, of course, important.

“But the whole point of what we do here is to give children a positive engagement with food – cooking from scratch and seeing it as a joy and a delight.”

The delivery of the light-filled, accessible garden room was mainly funded by the Mayor of London through the ‘High Streets for All Challenge’ scheme, with “generous” additional support from several charitable trusts.

Speaking to the Citizen at the event, Hackney’s mayor lauded the “ambitious” CIC and its “extraordinary” new facilities.

“They’re just unstoppable,” she said.

But although last week marked a new milestone for the food school, the future hinges on viable funding sources.

With both local authority and school budgets facing the squeeze, HSF is focusing on community engagement and corporate partnerships.

This means getting big supermarkets, food producers, restaurants, and people who are “just generally interested in the health of the nation” to help finance strands of lessons, Nichols said.

“We’d like to be able to do more of the free community cooking classes funded by outside sources,” she added, pointing to past culinary lessons HSF designed for diabetic men.

While organisers prepare to bid for council funding at its next round, the Citizen asked Hackney’s mayor if she envisages food school hubs like this emerging in the borough in the near future.

“If it’s successful, it’s something I’d love to replicate,” she said.

“But one step at a time”.