Where Does the Food Come From?

You know I love that map of York from 1852. It has featured in, and often inspired, some previous posts on here. One day I’d like it in a big frame on my wall. Anyway, one of the things I kept noticing on the map, especially down around the Fishergate area, and just a little bit (because the map cuts off) out along Holgate Road, was the nurseries. They took up lots of space and I was curious about what they were growing. 

Initially there was one such nursery inside the city walls, near the train station. This was set up by the Telford family in around 1665, on a site formerly belonging to a Dominican friary, which would have had a garden of some kind. The Telfords sold plants and seeds and trees to go into people’s gardens, and the nursery was still in business in 1815 when the Backhouse family bought it. The Backhouses (three generations of them, father, son, and grandson all called James) ran nurseries in York until the mid twentieth century. They had an interest in botany and collecting plants; there was a more widespread interest during the Victorian period in exotic plants, and bringing said plants to grow in one’s garden. The grounds of York Cemetery, actually, are a good place to see how this interest in plant species played out in practice. Anyway, the nursery inside the city walls had to move in 1841, because the railway station moved in. Yes, York train station used to be inside the city walls, just on the other side of the walls from where it is now. So Backhouse Nurseries moved over to Fishergate, and then out to Holgate Road, to the west of the city. But as the fashion for large, high-maintenance, gardens faded out, so did the nurseries: most of the Backhouses’ land was sold in the 1920s and in 1955 the city bought the remaining land and turned it into what is now West Bank Park. Right next to the park are two quiet residential streets: Nursery Drive and James Backhouse Place. 

So, cities like York used to have nurseries, supplying plants and seeds to people who wanted to grow interesting things in their gardens. Sometimes people just wanted to grow food in their gardens, too, of course, and certainly people did so, and certainly some of the plants the nurseries sold were edible. But not everyone living in the centre of a city could grow all the food they needed. This is where the market gardens came in, another thing you used to see outside cities. 

I had initially wanted this post to be about market gardens that used to supply York, but I couldn’t find enough evidence for where they would have been and when they operated and when they stopped existing. Not even my map could help me here. But I had another thought instead, one more broadly about food production in general and how we used to be so much better about producing our food locally than we are today. 

There are efforts to produce food locally in York, or nearby, certainly (indeed, there is a whole charity dedicated to doing this), and if you live in York you might have heard of the Food Circle market, for example, bringing in produce grown in North Yorkshire, or you might have come across the community gardens around the city, and experienced the magnificent beautiful dream that is Greenfields Community Garden, where all the good things grow. But growing food in or near a city, for the sustenance of that city, used to be so much more common, and looking at York, as one example, I think that a look back at where York’s food used to come from would not only be interesting for its own sake, but might also get us thinking about where our food currently comes from and where it could (or should) come from. It has certainly got me thinking, at least. 

We know York had monastic houses, plural, around the city during the Middle Ages, and these commonly had their own gardens, growing vegetables and fruit and herbs: we’ve got a miniature ‘medieval garden’ just outside Fishergate Bar, woven willow-branch edging and all, as a nod to St Andrew’s Priory that used to stand nearby. This isn’t so much an example of a place providing food to the wider community, but more an example of general self-sufficiency when it comes to food production. 

York has quite a strong history of orchards. Even today, old fruit trees still survive in the middle of places like the Tang Hall suburbs, or anywhere built on the site of an ancient orchard. I went to a fascinating talk last year on this topic, where I learned that some of the orchards that survive now, such as one down in Fulford, or up in Clifton next to the Dormouse pub, were originally part of mental hospitals that stood on those sites, and which were self-sufficient in terms of producing their own food. 

Also, if you had a garden, you grew stuff in it. You didn’t pave it over or let it fill with junk! You can see gardens on the old maps of York; for example, Garden Street in the Groves supposedly gets its name from the long back gardens that the houses on that street possessed – these don’t seem to exist now, which is disappointing. When the village of New Earswick was built at the beginning of the twentieth century, the houses were deliberately planned to have gardens, and trees to grow fruit. We could even go down a whole other route here about how gardening, and allotments, were encouraged during the Second World War – apparently the grass out front the Castle Museum was given over to vegetable gardens at one stage. 

But coming back to market gardens for a moment: Bishopthorpe, so far as I can tell, was the place where most of the market gardens for York were located, and I feel very encouraged by the fact there is now a nursery there, selling fruit and vegetables and plants to put in one’s garden…the more I read about this place the more I want to go there. Bishopthorpe isn’t that far away – just a short expeditionary walk south of York…

Anyway, I suppose this point of this is all to say that if any town or city needs to have somewhere where its food comes from, why is our ‘place where the food comes from’ often so far away, or so unknown? This was a very York-specific post, one which would make most sense to someone who knew the city well. But anyone, from anywhere, can think, ‘where does my food come from? Where did it used to come from? Where could it come from?’ 

The map in question: https://interactivemaps.uk/york-1852/#17/53.9622/-1.0821