British startup is sowing an agricultural revolution from 100 feet under the streets of London
By Larry Carroll Microsoft News Center Staff
Image from Microsoft News
Looking for a little Earth Day inspiration? An abandoned air raid tunnel beneath the streets of London might not be the first place you’d check. But that’s where British startup Growing Underground is forging a bold experiment in subterranean farming, raising sustainable produce that reaches tables as soon as four hours after harvest.
“It’s incredible to take a place that was built for a time of destruction, and turn it into a place of creation,” said Richard Ballard, who alongside co-founder Steven Dring hatched the idea of repurposing the tunnels as a clean, zero-emission agricultural alternative.
“If we can inspire other people to do this, brilliant,” said Dring. “This is just the start.”
Not long ago, the future didn’t look as promising for London. In January of 1941, dozens of people were killed when a bomb from a German fighter plane left a 120-foot-wide crater of carnage; in April, following a heavy air attack on Bristol, Hitler’s infamous “Fuhrer Directive No. 30” said that “All who love freedom will join the fight against England.”
In response, dozens of men were dispatched underground with picks and shovels; if the residents of London were to survive, it was time to build tunnels.
“There are two spiral staircases – they look like DNA interwoven with each other at each end of the tunnel,” said Dring, who spends his days farming in the Clapham Common tunnel, located 12 stories below the bustling city streets. “They built them that way so they could get two thousand people down to safety as quickly as possible.”
“This whole thing is massive, two linear tunnels a half a kilometer long,” he said. “There’s an upstairs and a downstairs, like a mezzanine, a huge, vast place. Our landlord tossed us the keys and said ‘Here you go. Carry on.’”
Dring and Ballard were first inspired three years ago with the idea that sounded just crazy enough to change the world. Calling themselves “Growing Underground,” they raised some (quite literal) seed money, received said keys and got to work.
“We bought some cheap hydroponic equipment and lights from Finland,” Dring said, laughing. “And then we started growing lettuce in a tunnel.”
Today, the air raid shelter that once housed three-tiered bunk beds has three-tiered beds of herbs. With the roar of “The Tube” in the background, farmers are growing pea shoots, radish, celery and parsley every bit as delicious and nutritious as you’d get from a traditional farm – and according to some, even better.
Any attempt to build a modern-day facility so enormous, temperature-controlled, sealed-off and subterranean would be scuttled by expense and zoning ordinances. But when these tunnels were built, the requirements of creating a safe wartime shelter unwittingly provided Growing Underground with exactly what they would need some eighty years later.
