Andy Matthews

Can the manipulation of the Metropolitan Green Belt boundary democratise UK food production and provision?

In January 2014, the sleepy village of Yalding on the outer edge of the Metropolitan Green Belt was leaked as one of the sites for a new 'garden city' on the edge of London.

Great Yalding takes this speculative new development as the starting point for an investigation into how our food is farmed and sold. Using a tactic of 'green belt offsetting', a site for Great Yalding is provided on low quality land that happens to be Metropolitan Green Belt, whilst a stretch of currently vulnerable farmland is newly protected. At the boundary of these two conditions, a new market is established which mediates between agricultural production and the new settlement.

Focused on the Market Square, this project aims to interpret contemporary attitudes and and issues in relation to food regarding class, taste and snobbery.