My name’s Charlie and I have lived in a ‘back-to-back’ terraced house in Bradford, Northern England since 2005. I have been studying and working with permaculture since I completed an intro course at the end of 2008, quickly followed by my Permaculture Design Certificate in 2009.
On this website, I am sharing the 10 designs I am creating to complete my Diploma in Applied Permaculture with the Permaculture Association (Britain)!
As an ethnobotanist who specialises in food systems, I have been applying permaculture design to creating food related initiatives in Bradford, whilst developing growing skills, engaging my deep love of plants and people-plant relationships. You can read more about my ‘ethnobotanical musings’ on my blog ‘notes from the field’!
As a co-founder and co-creator of Horton Community Farm Permaculture LAND centre I developed skills in designing, developing and running community engagement programmes and projects. These included working with the large, diverse and intergenerational community on the doorstep and across the city to engage people of all ages and backgrounds in food growing, wildlife friendly gardening, forest gardening, forest schools and therapeutic gardening, as well as seed saving.
Inspired by my role as Ecologist for 1mile² Bradford, a multi-stakeholder, Citizen Science project hosted by Ecoversity at the University of Bradford I founded Grow Bradford, a participatory research project, at the intersection of art and biodiversity, to document, connect and promote food growing and biodiversity across the district. The project is now commissioned by Bradford Council’s Public Health to deliver the one of the 4 elements of their Good Food Policy, and promote Community Led Growing across the district.
Through meeting Emma Hill, of re-considered, as part of Grow Bradford, I partnered with Emma to co-found Plenty Preserves, a project working with Bradford Council’s Wholesale market which developed a range of preserves. With so much surplus to work with and after experimenting widely with preserving, pickling and fermenting we formed a collective who developed Plenty at the Square, a community face and hub at South Square centre which runs a vegetarian and vegan café, which continues to include, pickling, preserving and creative use of surplus, homegrown and foraged foods.