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good life L
The
The Culpeper Family Hospitality Group has transformed a sterile space into a functioning farm, producing the salads on its diners’ plates. Emma Lake visits the urban oasis
ondoners consume some 4.8 million tonnes of food each year, but the city is largely disconnected from the food sys-
tems that nourish it, with convenience having become an expectation in both domestic and commercial kitchens. This separation between produce and plate
struck Nico Tréguer, co-founder of the Cul- peper Family Hospitality Group, when he arrived in the capital from his native France in 2005, and throughout the group’s expan- sion he and business partner Gareth Roberts have sought ways to recreate this relationship in urban environments. At their first property, the Culpeper in Lon-
don’s Spitalfields, which opened in 2014, this took the form of a rooftop garden, where guests could dine while surrounded by the garnishes and salads served on their plates. A similar rooftop garden was created at the Buxton bistro and hotel in nearby Brick Lane, where herbs are grown to supplement both dishes and cocktail menus. Now the group, which also includes the
Green in Clerkenwell and Britain’s first organ- ically certified pub, the Duke of Cambridge in
Islington, has created an urban farm in Dept- ford, south London, an area better known for its historic dockyards and artistic residents than fertile soil. Working with grower Jack Astbury, whose company Urban Organic has tended the group’s earlier ventures, Tréguer and Roberts have overseen the conversion of a 5,000 sq ft plot of land into a small permaculture farm producing vegetables, fruits, salads and herbs for use across the portfolio. The partners, business graduate Tréguer
and architecturally trained Roberts, acquired the land along with a historic house, which they have restored, in 2020. The pair built more sustainable housing on the site while retaining the remainder of the plot to realise their ambition of bringing their teams and guests closer to food production. Tréguer says: “We tend to be quite excited by
a good use of space. From the very beginning at the Culpeper we had the rooftop, which we used in a small way to grow what we could, but that was always supposed to be a stepping stone while we found more space to increase what we could grow.
“It took us a bit longer than we had envis-
aged to find grounds with proper soil, but when we took on this site we were very keen to keep this little plot tucked away for a farm that would bring together the teams in the pubs and our neighbours here.”
From the ground up Turning a patch of land impacted by gener- ations of industrial use and building works into a city oasis is, unsurprisingly, no small feat, but it’s one that Astbury and his team at Urban Organic worked towards in an unwavering belief that cities can produce as well as consume food. Astbury, who began work on site in April,
says: “This is a values-based project. We believe food growing should be a part of all our lives and that requires people to put it in around us. Here we are trying to grow food while creating a habitat. In the countryside you have to take down forests to grow food; in a city you’re actually creating a habitat while growing food.” When Urban Organic arrived on-site the
The site before its transformation 18 | The Caterer | 15 September 2023
land had been further compacted by build- ing work, so when they dug they found the
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