Pam Warhurst

This clip is from a series of 100 life history interviews with environmental campaigners in the UK, 1970-2020. It will feature in a book published by UCL Press in 2026. The full interview, along with the rest of the collection will be searchable on the British Library’s Sound and Moving Image catalogue and the interviews will be accessible onsite at the British Library in St Pancras from February 2026. For more information visit www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ohemQuotation:Barbara Brayshay: So Pam we’d just got as far as beginning to talk about Incredible Edible. Could you tell me about the inspiration for that and how it started?Pam Warhurst: Yes. It was-Barbara Brayshay: You said you’d been, you listened to-Pam Warhurst: Tim Lang yes. Yes, yes, yes. So I heard Tim Lang who was Professor of Food at City University in London, talked about food and the planet and the like. And just a gentle and angry reminder from him that we weren’t doing a right lot. And I left there incensed because I thought, right this is last ditch saloon.Barbara Brayshay: So when you say food was that-Pam Warhurst: So, from a sustainability point of view.Barbara Brayshay: Yes, that’s what I was- Yes.Pam Warhurst: From a sustainability point of view he was talking about the use of the earth’s resources, he was talking about, you know, we run out of them by the September of the year I think. Well I mean all these analogies that people use around the imbalance of the lifestyles that the rich West live as opposed the impact on the planet and ultimately the people who pick up the mess which are the poorest in society. Whether they are at the other side of the globe, or whether they’re here. And I just thought I can’t be doing with this anymore. And because I had been a leader through the Rio Earth Summit. I did get excited that it was possible that the leaders of the world could actually see what was happening, waited through Kyoto, waited through Copenhagen. Blah blah blah blah. Got to Paris, got to Glasgow. All that other stuff which was after the invention of the Incredible Edible as it were but proved that the case was true. And it seemed to me that the scale of the problem that we’d presented to ourselves could only be dealt with if we engaged people in the conversation through the way they lived their lives. It seemed to me that things had to be done at such a pace that even though I’d no idea how long the whole thing was going to take, we’d better start now. And I was reminded of the old adage from the Forestry Commission, ‘Best time to plant a tree, thirty years ago. If you can’t do it then, do it now.’ And it’s exactly the same thing. So what can we actually do? Rather than wait around waiting for people who are not inspired, who are dominated by celebrity and the front page and all the rest of it and the complete lack of balls it seemed to me in elected leaders, why don’t we the people just have a crack at doing something? And in a way it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter that we, that we control countries or whatever it might be because we have to be part of that solution. So why don’t we just fall off this wall and see who’s going to catch us was my view. And that’s exactly what we did. So I just got on the train, it’s the same old story. I thought right it’s got to be about people. How we do we engage people? Well it’ll have to be food because that brings us together, to an ability. You don’t need a degree to actually do it. You need to think about what you can do, what gifts you’ve got and so on. So I invented Incredible Edible and invented the three plate model because it seemed to me there’s no point in me saying I’ve got a proposition Todmorden. Shall we try and save ourselves? No, no, let’s just, three simple things that if we did them, even if we didn’t know why we were doing them, together would result in a change. And even if we don’t know what that change is. I guess I’d been around enough blocks to know that a lot of people who pretended they knew what these changes were, pretended they knew the importance of GDP, pretended they knew the importance of the way they were investing money, they’d obviously got it way wrong because we were up shit creek. So basically almost anything that we could would be step in the right direction. So that is why I kind of had the confidence because there is no- They don’t know what they’re doing, so why don’t we just see what we can do.Barbara Brayshay: And you are in an economist.Pam Warhurst: And I am an economist. Yes.Barbara Brayshay: So can you tell me about your three plates model?Pam Warhurst: Yes. So, so in all truth, although I do say it for a laugh, it, it was just three plates because I did only have a Virgin serviette to draw them on and it is a small serviette. It could have been a lot more complicated. So in a way I was blessed by that because it’s the simplicity of the story that helps, you know, get the traction. So the three plates is, okay what are the three ways that we can relate to food in the place we call home that we can impact on whatever the flavour of the government is and whatever the nature of political investment and priorities are. The three plates are: let’s make our neighbourhoods edible by planting food close to where we live with or without permission in order that people can pass by on a daily basis an edible landscape. Let’s just do that. We don’t need money to do that. We just need to think we’re going to wake in a morning, I’ll do my window box, we’ll do it in very public places. So if your window box is on a High Street, spot on, you don’t have to do, otherwise build a raised bed or do whatever you’re going to do. But make it, make it a conversation piece in the place you call home.Barbara Brayshay: So you maybe put a placard up or something.Pam Warhurst: Yes. Propaganda Gardens is what we call them.Barbara Brayshay: Okay.Pam Warhurst: So people stop and they have a chat. And it starts to redefine what that place looks like because it’s green. It starts a conversation with strangers. This, one has to know and this again was because of the experience in local government, far too much year on year decision making. This is the long term, for as long as we’ve got, while the planet exists, so let’s not pretend we’re going to solve, you know, the problem we’re trying to address at Incredible Edible in year one, two and three because we’re not. Let’s just do it and trust that it’s going in the right direction. Bit of magic. So we create these Propaganda Gardens all over the place. People stop and have a look at them. They’re using the seeds from last year’s garden. It gives us the chance to say, ‘You don’t have to be a gardener to do this. Why don’t you do a nice sign.’ Or, ‘You don’t have to be a gardener about this, why don’t you write a poem about it?’ Or, ‘You don’t have to be-’ or whatever. Because people feel they don’t have the wherewithal to be part of a food revolution. And actually they do. Not everybody needs to grow. Everybody needs to find their gift and work out what that is. So that was the first plate. Let us do something that’s immediate, let us do it that within a season we can show people what might happen. And let’s see where that goes. So that was why it was the community plate. And obviously from the community plate came my interest in urban regeneration, redefining, you know, Carolyn Steel’s Hungry City and all that type of stuff. The second plate was learning because we don’t know how to do it, we’ve not been taught how to do it. But the learning I had in mind was peer to peer.Barbara Brayshay: Right.Pam Warhurst: The learning was we know folks on our streets that know how to do this. We know folks who can pickle. We know folks who can graft a tree. It’s, so how do we make this more meaningful in and out of season? We know miners used to come up from the mines and grow all the best tomatoes. Why are not we not talking to the miners about how to do it? Why, why do we have to employ food development workers to do it? I mean it’s fine, it’s a job and it’s all right but why do we have to rely on that? No. Let’s imagine we’ve got no money, which is I’m a pain in the neck about money, because all the time I’m saying imagine the money dries up, you’ve got to do it as if you’ve not got any money. And the third plate was, if you really want to create traction in the place you call home, for folks who haven’t been on this journey with you, who haven’t clocked that the Rio Earth Summit didn’t get us anywhere, who don’t really necessarily understand what the state of the planet is. If you want to get them behind you, create jobs. It’s the only thing you can do. Because when you create jobs you create a sticky money economy, and all the other stuff. So that’s why- And business was misinterpreted because people thought I meant sponsorship and I didn’t mean sponsorship.Barbara Brayshay: Right.Pam Warhurst: I meant job creation. I meant let’s expand our local market supply. Let’s get more local supply chains. Let’s talk to our local farmers and producers and get them. Let’s see. So that was the three plates. Community meets learning meets business.British Library catalogue number: C2037/90 Project clip number: 235