“Wouldn’t it be better to let the seasons tell us what’s on the menu?” (Riverford Organic Farmers, 2017-24)
The Regenerative Garden is a creative plant, vegetable and herb garden that is located within the grounds of RCA Kensington. This facilities a space for students to not only learn how to harvest their own dyestuffs for colour material exploration but allows them to grow and harvest their own vegetables and herbs as food sources. The herbs and vegetables could also be accessed by the kitchen at the RCA and served to students and staff as part of the weekly menu.
This project was established to not only align the RCA with other colleges such as Central Saint Martins and London College of Fashion both pioneering colleges in terms of sustainable outcomes and facilities but to challenge the perception of locality, traceability and community based growing. The organic food movement is so prevalent within society such as Riverford Organics founded by Guy Singh-Watson in 1986 with consumers demanding more traceability in terms of ‘farm-to-plate’ thinking.
This concept overlaps so clearly within the fashion and textiles space with regenerative textiles being both grown and harvested from the soil. We wanted to create a space that could encompass all of these capabilities whilst allowing communities to work together connecting students, staff and researchers. The project is a five-year development plan from seed to fully flourished allowing future across RCA groups to pick up the project and evolve it further. We have secured two plots within the grounds and base funding to start the development process to purchase tools and equipment. The aim is to make regenerative growing, working and thinking not only the norm but fully accessible to everyone across disciplines and practises encouraging community based learning.