A Lancaster Walking Trail: Our Food Growing Hope Spots

What’s on offer?

Enjoy this event at your leisure at any time throughout November!

Take a short 4km walk around Lancaster City to see some spaces and ways in which communities are growing food within our urban area and where we might want to see more food being grown in future....areas we are calling Rurban Hope Spots. How we produce, buy, eat and waste food has a critical role in both reducing the climate and biodiversity impacts of our food systems, as well as enabling us to adapt and be more resilient in the face of change.

You'll be able to explore the future of food growing in our city through places, videos, artist impressions and audio as you visit a number of information points on the tour with the opportunity to share your own visions for food in our city. You can also explore the tour via an interactive map that is available online.

What’s it about?

Bringing food growing into our cities gives communities the opportunity to get more in involved with food growing, to learn and share new skills, and gives us more control over how the food we eat is produced. Across the district new initiatives are emerging, from the Fruity Corners patch in a local park, to a cluster of seven schools setting up a growing project across their school grounds, to Claver Hill community garden where members produce a whole range of fruit, vegetables and salad all year round just on the edge of Ridge Estate.

In order to enable food growing to happen in more spaces we need to know what land is available, what kind of projects might be suitable in different spaces and what local communities might want to see. As part of our ESRC funded project 'Rurban Hope Spots' we are using Lancaster University research and local datasets to help identify where urban food growing could happen.

This walking tour will take you on a tour of some of these spaces as well as highlighting some of the amazing projects already taking place. It is also an opportunity to share your own memories of what food growing used to look like in the past and what you might like to see in future.

Who’s leading the event?

This event has been organised  by the Future Places Centre and the Rurban project (part of the Centre for Global Eco-Innovation, Lancaster University).

Open to

Anyone is welcome. The route is wheelchair accessible but will be mostly outside without cover from weather conditions.