All aboard the urban farm

The floors are lined with pot plants, tomato vines and coriander leaves. Hanging baskets swing from the handrails and the driver’s seat is blanketed in a green layer of mint, basil and thyme. Upstairs, the deck is filled with a fine, ultrasonic mist.

This is no ordinary double decker, though. This is the Farmbus, a new sustainable urban farm for the capital housed inside a converted red London bus. It opened last week at Mercato Metropolitano in Elephant and Castle, and it’ll be open throughout the summer as a pick-your-own farm and plant shop. The first batch of strawberries is expected in the next fortnight.

The Farmbus offers a unique way to grow sustainable produce in the capital and was created in response to Londoners’ pressing environmental and social concerns, says co-founder Sam Cox. Previously an architect, he teamed up with plant scientist Hugo Horlick to create Rootlabs, a company looking at innovative growing systems in urban environments. This is its first project.

The bus may have a retro feel but the concept is hi-tech. The strawberry farm on the top deck uses a technology called aeroponics, a food-growing method that doesn’t require soil. Instead, plants are close-suspended in the air and their roots are exposed to a fine, nutritious mist.

Not only does this allow Cox and Horlick to grow strawberries much more densely than they could with traditional methods but it’s also low-impact. The whole system runs on just 45 litres of water — 95 per cent of the water used is recirculated back into the system — and low-powered LED lighting keeps resources at a minimum, Cox explains.

“In the UK we import a huge amount of soft fruit and strawberries each year and we’re looking at how we can produce these in a very sustainable way.” Farmbus’s climate-controlled growing house is proof to the public that you can grow “substantial amounts of sustainable produce within a very small footprint,” continues Horlick. They hope to install solar panels on the roof in the coming months to help reduce that footprint further.

Strawberries are not the only fruits of Rootlabs’ endeavours: the Farmbus will also produce herbs for people living nearby and for the restaurants at Mercato Metropolitano, and they’ve recently built a hydroponic hop growing system in partnership with German Kraft, the market’s on-site sustainable brewery. It’s made using recycling beer barrels and the hops will be used to produce beer.

Community is at the project’s core: throughout the summer, Cox and Horlick will deliver a programme of workshops for the public on hydroponic food growing, indoor gardening advice and houseplants. There will also be free workshops for local schools and a monthly plant consultancy where Londoners can come in for advice on growing at home and find out what they might be doing wrong.

Cox hopes the “striking” structure of a red double decker bus will draw people in. “There’s this fantastic landscape of urban growing in London, so we really wanted to create something engaging for the public.” The classic design also seemed a fitting structure in which to house such an iconic British fruit.

The Farmbus will be parked in Elephant and Castle until the end of summer, after which Cox plans to move it to another London site or even get it moving with a biodiesel engine. “We’re really interested in how we can improve environments through the use of planting, whether that’s for environmental benefits or general health and wellbeing of our cities and its populations. It’s about resource efficiency and how we can reduce the amount of materials and inputs we have to have.”

All aboard the sustainable food revolution.