Arthur Potts Dawson, Britain’s greenest chef, is standing on a rooftop in the
smelly depths of King’s Cross, showing me round his garden with the pride of
a latter-day Capability Brown. Twenty feet away, police cars are howling and
cement trucks rumbling past in an apparently never-ending stream. But here,
in this little oasis of greenery, strolling under the hop-poles with rhubarb
and ruby chard sprouting around us, it is almost possible to forget where we
are.
“Just look at the colour of these new leaves,” Potts Dawson says, caressing
one of his strawberry plants. The herbs for his restaurants (Acorn House in
King’s Cross, and the brand new Waterhouse on the canal in gritty Hoxton),
including no fewer than six different kinds of mint, are growing in large
barrels. In huge troughs along the edge of the rooftops, rocket, cabbage,
lettuce, garlic, shallots, tomatoes, marrows, pumpkins and several different
varieties of bean have been planted and, for pudding, red, white and
blackcurrants, black gooseberries, apples, pears and figs. Potts Dawson is
also trying to grow sea-kale, although he says it will take him about four
years before he’ll know if he’s succeeded.
You can tell immediately that this is a chef’s garden. Apart from the fact
that it’s devoted exclusively to edibles, there is recycled kitchen
equipment everywhere. A row of aloe vera plants thrive in huge tins that
once contained confit de canard. A broomstick, wearing ancient chef’s
whites, does duty as a scarecrow. Dangling from the metal bars of the fire
escape, some empty Laurent-Perrier bottles, relics of a party in the
restaurant, have been pressed into service as plant holders. There are two
thriving wormeries and a compost bin piled with restaurant scraps.
Potts Dawson, 6ft 6in, ginger-haired and a schoolboyish 37, is an
unlikely-looking revolutionary. But with the restaurants he runs in
partnership with the Shoreditch and Terrence Higgins trusts, he has launched
the entirely new concept of the eco-restaurant. In an industry notorious for
its waste, he prides himself on using energy from sustainable sources,
cleaning his plates with ozone rather than detergent, and only buying food
that is ethically grown and as locally sourced as possible (he does import
from Europe, but never by air), brought to him without any pack-aging.
Moreover, both restaurants aim to train ten young chefs each year in
sustainable cooking and eco-responsibility.
The roof garden, he says, is merely the logical end of this process. “I
realised I was ending up with a lot of food waste which I could turn into
soil. What excited me was the idea of closing the loop and creating a
sustainable restaurant by using the waste to grow more food.” Now he’s
combined his culinary and horticultural skills, along with useful
environmental tips, to produce his first recipe book (he calls it “a green
lifestyle book”): The Acorn House Cookbook, a canter through
the growing seasons that proves that going green doesn’t have to be a
gastronomic disaster.
Potts Dawson started the garden last year, siting it on top of the shed where
he keeps his bins: a concrete bunker which needed no extra reinforcements,
since it had once held a huge oil drum containing the diesel that powered
the whole building (“If it had blown up, it would have taken half of London
with it”). Then he had some large troughs made from storm-felled trees by
young offenders on a social-rehabilitation programme. The garden is run on
similarly right-thinking principles. “I always plant three seeds: one for
the earth, one for the pests and one for me,” he says. He uses no
pesticides, not even biological ones. “That’s the great thing about a
concrete jungle,” he says, “no slugs.” In fact, the main pests with which he
has to contend are cats, who like to relieve themselves in his vegetable
beds. Instead of trying to discourage them, he is trying to find a way of
working with them. “They’re all taught to use cat litter, so I put up a
litter tray and so far, they seem to be using it,” he says.
Regular watering is, of course, a requirement for most successful roof
gardens, and the reason they are usually rather eco-unfriendly, but Potts
Dawson has a special machine that dehydrates his food waste. This water is
then sprayed over the garden, “but only at the height of summer”, he
insists. Otherwise, the soil is kept moist with mulch made from the
restaurant’s Christmas decorations: some storm-felled branches, obligingly
chipped for him by the council.
Potts Dawson is as passionate about his garden as he is about his restaurant.
“Gardens are very emotional places,” he says, “especially for chefs. They
are where you first start recognising what the seasons are doing. I really
set it up for my trainees.” He gardens there about three times a week, as
well as popping up for a quick sunbathe when the weather permits, and it is
his favoured location for positive staff meetings. “If I ask someone to meet
me in the garden, they know they’re going to get a pat on the back, or a pay
rise, or a promotion. I’d never sack anyone there.” When he planted an apple
and a pear tree last autumn, he organised a wassail ceremony to celebrate;
all the staff were invited to the garden to bang drums, light fires and
toast the health of the trees with champagne. It seems to have worked; they
are very healthy.
But fertile though the garden is, it is simply not large enough to supply the
restaurant on a regular basis, although last year Potts Dawson was able to
put his home-grown yellow beans and a tomato chutney on the menu. “In one
week last summer, I took away about 16kg of veg from up here,” he says. Now
he has decided on a new venture to raise awareness of eco issues and
simultaneously use up his excess vegetables. Having bought a narrowboat,
which he will moor outside Waterhouse, he has persuaded one of his chefs,
Bob Griffiths, to live sustainably on it, feeding himself on what the garden
at Acorn House and the planned one at Waterhouse can provide. “He will live
without electricity, and won’t buy anything. He’s a veg-head, so he’s quite
keen.”
Potts Dawson is something of a veg-head himself. His father, Rufus Potts
Dawson, was an artist, his mother, Kari-Ann Moller, a model who appeared on
Roxy Music album covers in the Seventies and was the Cross Your Heart bra
girl in the Sixties. When his parents split up, his mother married Mick
Jagger’s brother Chris, and Arthur spent his childhood shuttling between his
mother’s London flat and his father’s Dorset retreat. This is doubtless why
he feels comfortable with the apparent contradiction of introducing bucolic
bliss into the heart of the inner city. “There’s always been a connection
for me with the farm, animals, seasons, growing, and at the same time, a
cultural awareness of what the city does and how it consumes.”
He was first introduced to the joys of gardening by his paternal
step-grandfather, in whose Dorset garden he learnt all he knows about
compost. The garden at the River Café, where he was head chef, was another
inspiration, and it’s clearly a two-way process. He says, rather
conspiratorially, that the River Café’s Rose Gray has expressed an interest
in acquiring a food dehydrator, too.
Potts Dawson has, of course, made some mistakes. Just the memory of how he
once gaily tossed his dehydrated food waste into his wormery, which then
sucked all the water out of his worms and wiped out the entire population,
still causes him to wince and bury his head in his hands. “I was distraught!
Heartbroken! I still am. I’ve never killed that many things in one go –
although I’ve killed a lot of shellfish in my time.” Otherwise, he says it’s
been plain sailing: “Everything I’ve planted has grown.”
Meanwhile, his mission to green up one of London’s most urban quarters marches
on apace. The derelict house next door is going to be turned into a hotel,
and Potts Dawson is planning to take over its roof terrace as well. The
powers-that-be at the new Eurostar terminal down the road have asked him to
help plan their roof terrace, as has the nearby advertising company Wolff
Olins. His dream, he says, is to see a network of roof gardens all over
London. “If cities are going to survive,” he says, suddenly turning sombre,
“then we have to re-use our waste and live more sustainably.”
The Acorn House Cookbook by Arthur Potts Dawson is published by Hodder &
Stoughton on May 29, priced £20
