Memories of 'Mr Seel's Garden': Engaging with historic and future food systems in Liverpool

On the outer edges of Liverpool ONE, a 42 acre regeneration area of the city centre, there is a Tesco Superstore. This is unremarkable in itself - you can't go very far in Liverpool without running into one - however, if you venture just around the corner of the main entrance you'll find a set of plaques that reproduce an 18th Century map of the area. The description states that this area was once 'Mr Seel's Garden'. Drawing the contemporary viewer into a lost past, the description states: "you are standing on what was the garden, represented by an asterisk". You are not all that stands on what was the garden, however, as the Tesco itself is also directly on top of the garden site. Yet, even while you might catch yourself becoming a little nostalgic - imagining a kindly Mr Seel handing you a freshly cut cabbage - the description lets you know that "Thomas Seel was an eighteenth century merchant. He made money out of the dreadful slave trade, but used some of it to pay for Liverpool's first infirmary".

The uncanny juxtaposition of current and historic food systems, made visible by this map, has been commented on by a number of Liverpool local food activists. The vivid experience it produces, draws together multiple elements - food, maps, history, time, power, cruelty, memory, intertwined local and global communities - to paint a complex picture of the changing nature of communities and the systems that connect them together. Our pilot demonstrator project aims to engage with the productive knots and tangles woven together by 'Mr Seel's Garden' through a collaboration between a broad range of partners with a shared interest in time, food and community engagement. Working with community organisations within Liverpool's fledgling local food movement, this project will explore how engaging local communities with the changing patterns of food production could contribute to current grassroots efforts within Liverpool to raise awareness around current food issues.

To describe the specifics of the project in brief: volunteer and academic researchers will use a combination of research methodologies - oral history, archive research and site identification/documentation - to build up a multi-layered picture of the changing nature of food systems in Liverpool. The data gathered from each of these activities will be made available to wider community on a project web page, and will feed into a creative strand that will develop a locative media application for GPS enabled smartphones, as well as a print media historic local food walking tour. These outputs will help to disseminate the results of the research work, while also raising awareness of local food issues and the project partners themselves. The overall process itself will provide material to support philosophical research into the interconnections between social understandings of time and community, archaeological research into methods of engaging communities with the historical environment and research into the pragmatic and affective aspects of archive use.

In its methods and overall approach, the project contributes to the Connected Communities programme by demonstrating the possibilities of making significant research contributions to a number of arts and humanities disciplines through the development of practical, creative and theoretical responses to community identified interests and challenges. In so doing it will address the core research concerns of the Programme by utilising comparative and historical methods to explore both how communities change over time, and how the process of historical research can itself impact on community responses to current challenges.

In addition to the academic beneficiaries outlined in the previous section, this project promises to be of benefit to a much wider group of potential users. It will be of most direct use to the community organisations themselves, by enhancing their research capacity, knowledge and skills. It will also help to raise their profiles, provide them with momentum to continue developing their local food projects, connect them to each other and to other local food organisations in Liverpool and link them with local research institutions. All the organisations are also keen to understand what interests participants in their projects and how to support this further. Our research into the experiential aspects of volunteer research work and how this shapes perceptions of the present is thus of interest to them and potentially to other community organisations working around heritage, environmental and historical issues. As a result one of the outputs of the project is an accessible report that examines benefits, issues and best practice suggestions that arise from the work.

The Friends of Everton Park are also involved in setting up an Everton History Society, which would be supported by the project and is also inspired by a previous oral history project - The Lost Tribes of Everton - which this project would connect up with. Transition Liverpool is interested in using the skills develop to assist with working on a broader sustainability project, known as an Energy Descent Action Plan. They intend to utilise the outcomes of the project to develop further history projects or 'Honouring the Elders' projects and will share the project outcomes on the Transition Network's project and resource online databases, which will then be available across the breadth of this fast growing international movement. Friends of Sudley Park are particularly interested in using the project to kickstart the development of their walled garden project and will also share the project and its outcomes with the Walled Kitchen Gardens network (http://www.walledgardens.net).

More broadly, both the Liverpool Primary Care Trust (PCT) and Liverpool City Council (LCC) have identified priorities for the 2010 - 2020 Decade of Health and Well-being. These include supporting individuals to 'connect', 'take notice' and 'keep learning'. As part of this Everton Park has been designated as a 'transformational project' in the new North Liverpool Strategic Regeneration Framework by the Liverpool City Council, Liverpool Vision, and the PCT. This project is thus well placed to contribute new perspectives to local policy initiatives that will be just getting under way. Project partners Derek Dottie (LCC) and Sarah Dewar (PCT) will be following the progress of the project and will also discuss the implications of the research outcomes with us towards the end of the project.

Local food is extremely topical nationally and internationally. The UK Local Food Network distributes £57.5 million worth of grants funding and the Making Local Food Work partnership, linking five organisations including the Soil Association and the Plunkett Foundation, are also supporting a multitude of local food projects. Both of these larger organisations, and others like them are considered to be potential users of the research. Our interest in embedding local food issues in historical cultural narratives, and understanding how experiences of temporality support change, could potentially shed light on the kinds of broader social frameworks that may enable local food projects to be more successful.