No, it’s not an obscure industrial injury amongst glass-blowers, but a term being floated by UWE academic Richard Spalding (via Ecojam.org) to describe the land running up the northern edge of the M32, including Stoke Park.
Given the recent eco-partnership between UWE and BCC to create The Black Cloud, this may well be the stating point of another fancy bit of strategising like Feb 2009’s proposal from Bristol Council (prop. H Holland) to maintain their own “organic” beef herd on the land. Mercifully for local taxpayers that idea bombed, for reasons of common sense including the limited marketability of the more esoteric cuts of beef such as Oxtail, Tongue and Prairie Oysters. (Note for townies: a cow isn’t just a big sirloin steak on legs).
Ignoring the specious food miles arguments for a moment, it is a pretty sensible idea to use this land for agriculture. But just leave it to the farmers, yes? Offer the land to professional producers at a market rate and see if anyone is interested. If not, turn a bit of it into allotments, which will sort out the forecast 518 plot shortfall in the Council’s 10-Year Allotment plan (a worthy 2.0 on the Stalinometer) on the assumption that that is really a major problem given that a quarter of today’s plots are empty.
[Update - alright fine, let’s discuss food miles. If Waitrose can pay fuel tax, road tax, international shipping, duty, customs inspection fees, staff wages, employers’ national insurance and corporation tax and still reliably deliver produce at a cheaper price per pound than I could achieve by growing it on my window ledge even if I put a negative value on my own time and labour, then what does it matter how many miles that produce has travelled to get to me? Replace all those arbitrary taxes with a single carbon/energy tax, and industrial agriculture and commercial food suppliers are still going to do a more efficient job than hobby-peasants with a DVD box set of River Cottage.]
