The director of Building with Nature on the need to put nature at the heart of development, and why we may have to rethink our desire for our own private gardens. Portrait by Britt Willoughby Dyer <\/p>

Gemma Jerome is perched at the kitchen table in her flat in Stroud, Gloucestershire, wearing a vivid cerise top, and dangly earrings under her crop of red hair. \u201cMy interest \u2013 and it runs through me like a stick of rock,\u201d she says, \u201cis not the environment but social justice. How do we give people fair and equal access to housing that includes green space?\u201d A chair of her local Labour Party association for two years, Gemma speaks of, \u201cdisrupting the market economy around placemaking and development for profit\u201d, by means of the highly successful green infrastructure benchmark she has devised as founder-director of Building with Nature.<\/p>\n

Gemma paints a picture of living off-grid, \u201cclimbing trees and swimming in rivers\u201d. Scratch a little deeper and she reveals that in fact she spent a lot of time walking the dogs, cooking, digging the garden <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
Growing up in Manchester, Gemma came to know nature by playing out in the streets and in nearby Crumpsall Park. \u201cIf you\u2019re from Manchester, it matters where you\u2019re from, and I\u2019m from the poor bit,\u201d she explains. \u201cIt\u2019s a very hard landscape, but these pockets of nature became my whole world.\u201d Now 38, she describes herself as being the recipient of \u201cthe last \u2018assisted place\u2019 before the Labour Party abolished it\u201d \u2013 a political irony, as she appreciates. This scheme, which covered school fees for deserving pupils from poorer backgrounds, enabled her to attend the highly academic Bury Grammar School. As a self-described \u201cswot\u201d, she got a place to read social anthropology at Edinburgh University, choosing the course because \u201cI didn\u2019t know what I wanted to do\u201d. Not surprisingly, perhaps, she dropped out after a year and went off to live at a smallholding just outside the city.<\/p>\n
Gemma paints a picture of living off-grid, \u201cclimbing trees and swimming in rivers\u201d. Scratch a little deeper and she reveals that in fact she spent a lot of time walking the dogs, cooking, digging the garden and generally \u2013 as the youngest \u2013 \u201cbeing treated like a bit of a dogsbody\u201d. (She was the one who had to empty the overnight toilet bucket into the composting loo each morning.) After five years of this, and a move to Lincolnshire, Gemma got a job as a play-worker in a primary school, where a colleague questioned what she was doing with her life.<\/p>\n

In a moment of sudden clarity, she realised that despite the fact that good best-practice guidance was being offered by wildlife trusts and others, \u201cthe quality of planning applications was not improving\u201d, so something else was needed. <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
So in 2007, at the age of 24, she restarted her academic career, enrolling at University of Liverpool to read Civic Design. In her final year, she got a place at the School for Social Entrepreneurs, which involved setting up a community garden<\/a> in Liverpool. At that point, she says, \u201cI could have put all my energy into my business, but because of growing up in poverty, I wasn\u2019t ready to be a freelancer, chasing projects all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
She stayed in academia, studying for a PhD while initiating projects in the city such as a forage school and a community-garden design business. It was during her interview for a job at Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust that she came up with the benchmarking idea. In a moment of sudden clarity, she realised that despite the fact that good best-practice guidance was being offered by wildlife trusts and others, \u201cthe quality of [planning] applications was not improving\u201d, so something else was needed.<\/p>\n
As for horticulture, Gemma\u2019s answer to the question, \u2018Should people be given their own gardens?\u2019 is perhaps surprising: \u201cNo! If anything, the opposite. If you can have high-quality public gardens, parks or \u2018meanwhile spaces\u2019, then I think it reduces the need for gardens.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a point of view that has been in play since the Modernist dream of the 1960s and 1970s. Gemma is possibly the first interviewee to appear in this magazine who might come across as \u2018anti-garden\u2019 in some contexts, but she is clearly completely fearless, and on one level does not care what anyone thinks. But she has had an allotment for more than a year now, so may yet come to alter that point of view.<\/p>\n
Here then, is an idealist, but also, crucially, a pragmatist. On Gemma Jerome\u2019s watch, things get done. And that is greatly to the benefit of the wider ecological movement.<\/p>\n
USEFUL INFORMATION<\/strong> Find out more about the Building with Nature initiative at buildingwithnature.org.uk<\/a><\/p>\n
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