Why cities need to grow their own food – and how offices can lead the way

A report from the London Assembly looks at the challenges around urban food growing. Could office farms provide at least some of the solution?

Here’s a striking statistic - 99% of the food and drink consumed in London is brought in from outside the capital. Food for thought, if you’ll pardon the pun, and something that brings up questions about the ability of our cities to feed themselves. 

The stat comes from the London: A Growing City? report, published by the London Assembly Environment Committee in April 2025, a study that calls on the Mayor to take urgent action on food growing across the capital. Of course, if everything is working as it should, the fact that the capital city is bringing nearly all of its food in from outside will work swimmingly, but if anything goes wrong there isn’t much room for maneuver. Disrupted supply chains, failed global harvests, strained logistics can all have a ripple effect on a city that relies on external sources rather than its own ability to grow food.

An alternative to land intensive growing 

According to the report, access to land is one of the biggest barriers to Londoners’ ability to grow food in the city, with unused sites requiring coordination between local authorities, landowners, and communities before anything can be planted.

Green Party Leader, Zack Polanski who was one of the authors of the report says, “In a city where more than half of households now live in flats – often with limited access to personal gardens – community food growing sites offer Londoners access to land to grow food."

As such, the committee’s key recommendations are new allotments and community farms, and a commitment from the Mayor to make London's food system more resilient. But land for new allotments is in desperately short supply, which is exactly the problem this recommendation runs into. More than 30,000 Londoners are currently sitting on allotment waiting lists, and in some boroughs the wait stretches into double-digit years – Islington's average sits at around 12 years, with some Londoners quoting waits of up to 17. The distribution of what little land exists is also uneven: Ealing has around 60 separate allotment sites, while Kensington and Chelsea has none at all. New allotments are a welcome ambition, but they depend on identifying, releasing and developing land in one of the most land-constrained cities in the world, which is not a quick fix.

London’s allotments are concentrated in the outer boroughs of London, with hardly any within central London, creating a doughnut effect. Credit: duncan99.wordpress.com

Not only do these soil-based solutions rely on access to public land outdoors, they are also subject to fluctuations that are often out of our control. These include a short season, exposure to extreme weather, and the time, mobility and access needed to actually tend a plot.

An earlier study by the Food Systems Transformation Group, for example, stated that “Food growing [...] depends on stable climatic (and political) conditions: extreme weather conditions and war both pose persistent threats to our food supply, as do ongoing challenges with transport, farm labour, and customs controls..”

At Square Mile Farms we believe there’s another solution that can be found inside buildings.

We work with businesses to turn unused spaces into thriving, hydroponic farms growing fresh, nutritious produce that can be distributed to employees, used in catering spaces and donated to local charities. These vertical growing systems take up a lot less space than traditional soil-based agriculture, are less energy intensive, and aren’t affected by changing climate conditions, customs regulations, political impacts or even seasonality. There are zero food miles, and therefore zero vulnerability in the supply chain.

Bringing communities together

The London Assembly’s report also highlights how community food growing brings benefits beyone the crop yield, enhancing social connection, improving wellbeing, and strengthening environmental responsibility. 

Polanski says “Food growing has a number of clear benefits – it teaches us how to be more sustainable, builds a sense of community and reduces the impact on the environment."

It's something we at Square Mile Farms have been saying for a long time, well before this particular report landed, and it's a point echoed in Arup's 2023 report Repurposing Buildings for Farming. The study was produced with input from operators and technologists across the vertical farming industry, including our own Hamish Grant, who makes the case that the value of local food production extends well beyond the crop itself. As Hamish puts it in the report: "One aspect that is becoming increasingly important and relevant is the significant value that locally grown produce can have in enriching the fabric of local communities."

We believe this passionately at Square Mile Farms, and in fact we see it every day in our clients’ Farms. Each harvest brings teams together to learn about the food that’s growing in their building, to gather as a community and share tips and recipes. Employees take home bags of produce that they’ve watched sprout from seedling to fully grown plant. This gives them a sense of connection to their food that you just don’t get when you’re one step removed from the process. 

Resilience starts with proximity

The report's central argument is resilience and what happens to London when its food supply is disrupted. The answer, it argues, is to build more growing capacity into the fabric of the city itself.

Office farms are part of that answer. When food is grown where people are, it shortens supply chains to almost nothing, reducing the need for logistics and storage and protecting consumers from the vulnerability of fuel costs or import restrictions. 

While we’re not saying that office growing can replace the broader food system, it can be an impactful nod to a more distributed and resilient urban food network.

The London Assembly's recommendations are a welcome start, and a comprehensive review of available land is overdue, but we're going further. Our clients recognise that they are custodians of growing space, too. Companies that invest in workplace farms aren't just ticking a wellbeing or sustainability box, they're participating in the wider conversation of helping cities to feed themselves.

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