FARM:shop will be using an empty retail unit to see how much food they can grow in an urban shop.

Urban Farming has been a hot topic  recently, with the rooftops of homes and supermarketsbeing transformed into fruit and vegetable gardens. Now the London FARM: shop project in Hackney is converting an empty retail unit into the world’s first farm in a shop.

FARM:shop is the brainchild of Something & Son — a sustainable-living focused design practice — and supported by the local council as part of Hackney’s Art in Empty Spaces project. Their mission is to see how much food they can grow in an urban shop, and to educate and inspire Londoners. They plan to have chicken coops on the roof, fish tanks outside the shopfront, and other live animals inside the shop. By employing a combination of new technologies and traditional methods, they will also grow fruit and vegetables inside the shop. Upstairs, a meeting room will be available for businesses to hire, and downstairs a cafe will serve up dishes using all the produce grown there. The whole space will be available to hire for events and parties, and all profits will go back into their farming outreach programme which teaches people how to grow food. Forty volunteers from the local community have been working to get the shop ready for launch at the end of October, and from then on FARM:shop will be open from Friday to Sunday with daily informative tours. The video below explains FARM:shop in more detail:

As food prices rise with the demand for more locally grown and sustainably-sourced food, could projects like FARM:shop soon become more permanent fixtures in cities worldwide?