The Landing, a kitchen garden on the roof of a Stockport parking lot, is filled to the brim with “curled soul”. This is a salad and a feeling. What was a gray, disused space above a shopping mall has been turned into an urban allotment garden by the closure, in which Korean cabbage blooms in wooden planters and the scent of fennel fills the air.
In the gutters there are early summer sweet alpine strawberries, and fig leaves and plump broad beans entwine under a row of trellis panels in front of a 1960s glass roof and behind a Primark shop.
Building The Landing was the work of Sam Buckley and his team at Where The Light Gets In (WTLGI), his award-winning restaurant across town. After the hospitality closed, Buckley struck a “very good deal” with the local council to lease the space and wheeled 20,000 tons of compost through the winding streets of the parking lot to the roof.
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“It took us 15 days to do this,” Buckley tells me. “We removed the lockdown and built the structures and planters. It was a lot of work. But we sat there and admired everything afterwards and drank a case of ice-cold beer. “
Although still unfinished, the garden is in bloom, and beets, berries, artichokes and more have already been harvested for the chef’s reopened restaurant. Lemons, curry leaves and melons are planned for the greenhouse soon.
The landing, Stockport (Photo: inews)
Buckley says, “We focus on diversity – herbs that can be used to flavor the menu. Things like peas, chives, berries. Over the garden, plants grow like a canopy, Japanese wine currants, yellow gooseberries, lots of lovage. We have some crazy plants up here.
“Of course we can’t deliver everything the restaurant needs. We wouldn’t want that anyway – we also want to support local farms and breeders. But it’s great to have this resource, to use the products fresh and to pickle and ferment for the winter. “
Buckley isn’t the only chef expanding his environmental focus during lockdown. Chefs and restaurateurs have been using their location for a long time, relying on seasonality and sustainability, but the pandemic has exacerbated the cause and kitchen gardens are more common than ever.
Tessa Lidstone of Bristol’s brilliant and tiny Box-E restaurant says that even the smallest spaces were used: “I think people saw the potential of tiny areas in lockdown – we used planters on our patio to grow food.
“We can produce a lot of food in a tiny piece of land. Instead of buying baskets of edible leaves, we pick them fresh.
“We also started to make more use of my father’s allotment – the lockdown was tough, but it gave us time to think. Many chefs have been thinking about sustainability for a long time, but it was definitely reinforced in the pandemic. “
In rural Kent, the lockdown’s efforts inspired restaurateurs Nick Selby and Ian James to set up the Walled Garden on Water Lane, where everything is self-sufficient.
“We started looking for a place back in May,” says Selby.
“We wanted to create a flower and kitchen garden and built a kitchen here to open a restaurant. We have a cook, a local who was recommended by Margos Henderson (famous by Rochelle Canteen).
“We are surrounded by landscape and the garden flows into it. It’s a natural enhancement. We have tomatoes and peas and in the fall we will harvest cabbage and pumpkins.
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“We’ve always supported that narrative, but it’s interesting to see what Lockdown did – it brought that idea to the fore. We’ll be opening our restaurant soon [1 July] and we serve food that we have grown. “
Back in Stockport, I speak to Nick Harlow, The Landing’s newly appointed chief breeder, who spends four days a week tending the plants. There are also groups of volunteer weekly volunteers. In exchange for a one-pot lunch, they lend a hand.
The Landing is not just a resource for WTLGI, but a firmly anchored community effort, explains the chef: “I used to come here and smoke with my friends and now I have this beautiful garden. Stockport is full of these woven roofs and they are all connected to one another. It’s a bit of clockwork orange.
“Over there you can see one of the largest brick buildings in the world – Stockport Viaduct – and in the distance the Peak District and Debenhams. Below us is Primark and this rather dreary mall.
“I want this to be a space for everyone. We start workshops and courses. It’s about the community – there is so much interest and desire to get involved.
“People come in and build flower beds, plant seven varieties of corn, and put willow branches over pumpkins. I want this to be a nice place that Stockport can benefit from. People can come here and eat Greggs if they want. “
Buckley hands me the first radish of the season. It’s delicate and subtle. Next is mizuna, a kind of bittersweet lettuce leaf with pepper and mustard. The Korean licorice mint tastes like you’d expect, but the mashua, a type of bulb with flowers similar to nasturtiums, brings a taste that I’ve never experienced before.
The landing (Photo: inews)
Much of The Landing’s early success can be attributed to Harlow. He has been looking for game feed for Buckley for many years, but now also looks after the garden four days a week. Harlow calls it an allocation, but Buckley is vehement that it isn’t.
“Whatever it is now, it used to be just a parking lot,” says Harlow. “My mother used to use it and parked across from where we are now. She had a favorite place, you know?
“I can’t imagine it beforehand. It was just boring, nothing. Fast forward 30 years and I’m here every day, in this concrete monolith that grows peas and runner beans.
“People see it now and they have confusion on their faces. For me it’s this coexistence – I’m up here alone most of the day and there are hundreds of people below me. I see people walking in Primark, yelling at their kids, steam rising, and I’m in a quiet bubble. It is really starting to attract nature. Ladybugs, bees. I saw a kestrel the other day. And a pigeon that eats chips from McDonald’s. “
Harlow’s expertise took The Landing beyond what it could have been. Together with Buckley, an extensive vegetable patch is developing into a blueprint that could and should be used by cities across the UK.
The gardener says: “A lot of people come up here. Young, old. Middle-aged working people. I think satellite cities like Stockport are booming because people have stayed closer to home. You don’t always have to go to Manchester.
“Leaves of lettuce picked from the ground are amazing. There’s nothing wrong with buying lettuce in the supermarket, but it’s not the same – not even close. ”
I close with an oca leaf, a South American root vegetable that resembles sorrel, and one of the strawberries grown in the gutter that are still small but effortlessly juicy. In the holiday sun, it’s hard to be anywhere else than here, on a car park rooftop in Stockport.
