What images spring to mind when you hear the phrase “sustainable farming?”

Chances are, you don’t immediately conjure up a picture of a warehouse with ranks of crops growing hydroponically under LED lights.

But at Canada Water’s multi-faceted new venue Corner Corner, London’s largest indoor vertical farm is showing how technology-driven approaches can be part of the solution to the challenges humanity faces in feeding itself in the 21st century.

Chris Davies is Founder and CEO of Harvest London, who run the farm for British Land as part of the Corner Corner operation. “Vertical farming tackles two major problems,” he explains. “The first of these is we need to produce more with less.” With global population predicted to approach 10 billion by 2050,1 he says, we need to increase food production by 70%.2 “If you compare vertical farms to traditional agriculture, in the same amount of space, we can grow up to 350 times the amount of produce and we do that with 95% less water and 95% less fertiliser.”

Growing crops indoors means they can be sealed away from the pests that traditional farmers need to wage constant war on, so production is 100% pesticide-free.

“The second bit is: maybe food shouldn’t be a totally globalised industry,” Chris continues. The UK imports 75% of its fresh fruit and vegetables. The drawbacks of this system include not only food waste and empty shelves when supply chains are interrupted by events such as Brexit, but also deterioration in the quality of the produce, impacting its taste and nutritional value.

Harvest London offers a solution to this issue. One of their major customers is Pizza Pilgrims, the on-trend artisan brand who’ve been making waves in recent years across London and beyond. “They used to buy their basil from Italy when they could get it, but for the last five years the basil on all their pizzas has come from our warehouse in East London,” says Chris. “We go from harvest to delivery in four hours, so it’s incredibly fresh and waste is very low.”

The farm at Corner Corner is designed to grow mostly salads, and it supplies lettuces, herbs and leafy greens to local customers including the canteens of Google, HSBC and KPMG headquarters in Canary Wharf, as well as Pear Tree kitchen, whose owners will open The Village Tree in Canada Water’s Three Deal Porters later this year. But the shortest supply chain it runs is to the food hall on site. Having salad produced and eaten in the same spot not only guarantees ultimate freshness, but gets people thinking about the future of food production and its role in urban development.

Corner Corner as a venue has something for everyone. As well as the food hall featuring a clutch of London’s finest purveyors of street food, there’s a jazz club offering an eclectic programme of live music and DJs, a café, open-plan seating and the immersive Minecraft: Village Rescue experience. “What the vertical farm brings to the table is another reason to come in and an opportunity for the local community to engage about where their food comes from,” says Chris. “It’s smack in the centre of the food hall and it’s covered in glass, so people can watch how the space is used to incorporate food production.”

The farm also has an education room, which Harvest London are looking to use to start conversations about food production before taking people on a tour of the farm and giving them a taste of the produce.

“We foresee schoolkids and adults to coming in and learning about where their food comes from,” says Chris. In partnership with British Land and Broadwick, who run the cultural offer at Corner Corner, Harvest London are starting to engage with local charities and businesses to get these conversations going.

Two local organisations that will be very much part of this conversation are small food growing operations that take a much more traditional approach. Global Generation run the multi-award-winning Paper Garden where they teach local people how to grow their own produce, while Surrey Docks Farm gives people a hands-on experience of animal husbandry. Both charities are community partners of British Land.

In a forward-looking urban development, there’s room for both traditional and futuristic approaches to growing food, says Chris. With the patterns of the way people live and work undergoing a period of rapid change, perhaps food production should be part of the mix when we think about how to use the space in our cities. “British Land have created this little cluster of agriculture businesses in London’s newest town centre,” he points out. “If that’s not a vote of confidence in the concept of local food production, then I don’t know what is.”