The Grow Batheaston Story

Since the early days of the Grow Batheaston (GB), project there has been a core of dedicated people driving it forward. It started with three, namely Victoria Wells, Phil Rogers and myself Toby Gascoigne. We were quickly joined by Ali Rogers, Emily Wright and Alison Harper.

All of us are Batheaston residents and we all share a vision; to strengthen community, encourage bio-diversity and build resilience through growing and sharing food.

One of the first things that we did was to write letters to the relevant local government types to try to garner support and get some funding. My dad always used to tell me “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”, and he was right. In this world of competitive capitalism we can do very little without money, so funding is a major part of what we focussed on for the first few weeks.

We are lucky to have some very open minded and progressive councillors in our area and we were delighted when Sarah Warren (Lib Dem ward councillor for Bathavon North Ward and also Cabinet Member for Climate Emergency and Neighbourhood Services), expressed an interest in what we were proposing. She pointed us in the right direction and helped us get our first bit of funding in the form of an Empowerment fund from Bath and North East Somerset (BANES).

To be fair, myself and Phil had been talking about this project (or something like it), for about 3 years prior to the Covid-19 outbreak so most of the ‘movers and shakers’ in the area were aware that something like Grow Batheaston might happen and were ready to act when we announced our intentions.

Along side the push for funding was the push to get local council on our side because it is their land that we want to use to grow food on. We wrote to Paul Crossley at BANES and asked him to attend a structured open air meeting. He joined us as well as representatives from Bathford Parish Council and Bathscape.

Paul asked some very pertinent questions (which got us all thinking), and showed encouraging enthusiasm for the project. Later he and a colleague joined some of the GB team for a walk around Catherine Way and some of Elmhurst to discuss the use of the bits of land (grassy verges), which BANES currently mows twice a month.

We did the same with Curo, a housing association which owns the majority of the land on the Estates and all the non-privately owned houses. We talked about forming a residents association and planting fruit trees and nut trees around the estate, an idea which they loved, and it was pretty much a done deal before the end of the walk about!

Another thing that we did was to contact the community and let them know what we were doing. After all Grow Batheaston is all about working together as the community. At around this time we were joined by Craig, a talented (and luckily for us), furloughed graphic designer with time on his hands. Alison Harper, our resident artist, came up with a logo and Craig used that and created the ‘look’ which we presented to the community by posting a letter (with pictures and everything!), through over a thousand doors around the area.

We had already set up our social media platforms and as a result of all this activity (and more!), we now have 142 followers on Instagram, 130 on twitter and 172 on facebook.