About
What is Mr Seel’s Garden?
Going into Liverpool’s city centre to buy fresh veg, grown locally in town, might seem pretty far-fetched. But if you go around the corner from Liverpool ONE’s Tesco Superstore you’ll find a plaque that shows that the area around Hanover street, including the land the Tesco now sits on, used to be full of market gardens. The plaques reproduce an 18th Century map of the area, with the description stating that this area was once ‘Mr Seel’s Garden’. Drawing the contemporary viewer into a lost past, the description states: “you are standing on what was the garden, represented by an asterisk”. You are not all that stands on what was the garden, however, as the Tesco itself is also directly on top of the garden site. Yet, even while you might catch yourself becoming a little nostalgic – imagining a kindly Mr Seel handing you a freshly cut cabbage – the description lets you know that “Thomas Seel was an eighteenth century merchant. He made money out of the dreadful slave trade, but used some of it to pay for Liverpool’s first infirmary”.
The inspiration for the project
The map creates an uncanny experience, with current and historic food systems jostling for attention. The vivid experience it produces, draws together multiple elements – food, maps, history, time, power, cruelty, memory, intertwined local and global communities – to paint a complex picture of the changing nature of communities and the systems that connect them together.
The aim of the Memories of Mr Seel’s Garden project was to engage with the productive knots and tangles woven together by ‘Mr Seel’s Garden’ through a collaboration between a broad range of partners with a shared interest in time, food and community engagement.
What we got up to
With all the current interest in growing food locally, including long waiting lists for allotments and many new community ‘Growers’ groups, we explored the history of local food in Liverpool to see what other surprises might be lurking around Liverpool. Dairies in Chinatown? Pig-farms on Mossley Hill? We wondered whether knowing more about where we used to get our food from might inspire other radical ideas about where we could grow our food in the future.
Volunteer and academic researchers used a combination of research methodologies – oral history, archive research and site identification/ documentation – to build up a multi-layered picture of the changing nature of food systems in Liverpool. The data gathered from each of these activities is now available from this web page and also fed into a variety of creative projects.
You can find a copy of our final project report here.
Who was involved in the project
The project was a collaboration between Transition Liverpool, Friends of Everton Park and the Friends of Sudley Estate, as well as academics from Liverpool, Manchester and Edinburgh. The main aim of the project was to explore how engaging local communities with the changing patterns of urban food production might contribute to current grassroots efforts within Liverpool to raise awareness around current food issues.
We wree funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and were one of ten Pilot Demonstrator Projects aimed at showcasing the distinctive approach of the new Connected Communities research theme.
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