I have emphasized earlier that the countryside of The Wash and the Fens inland effectively serve large towns and cities. The fisherman supplied shellfish and herring, the gozzard supplied geese and feathers, mutton and wool from the marshland shepherd, grain from the Fenland farmer. Each of these items in one way or another had a national economic significance of varying degrees. The ability to supply the city had a direct impact within the city. I illustrated earlier how Samuel Pepys paid a small fortune for two eels in 1666 – this was due to a ban on Dutch eel imports, and the Fens alongside other domestic sources could at that time not fulfil a supply to match demand. What had been a relatively cheap meal became an expensive luxury accessible only to those with funds. Is this a lesson to consider before resorting arable land to other uses?
In this way the economy of the Fens serving the needs of the urban areas is still valid today. However there is a larger change – in the past there was greater economic self-sufficiency within the Fens and the market towns. If you look at the old fenmen they supplied eels, fish and fowl to the town and city markets, but also provided for themselves and their immediate community. Perhaps the most notable and lasting example of this mixture of self-sufficiency and provision to wider markets were the washlanders of Welney, Whittlesey and Cowbit – a class of people that continued to operate in a traditional manner well into the twentieth century and were the last of the real fenmen.
Stanhope in 1867 described them thus: “The position of ‘cottagers’ or small freeholders deserves also some notice. They are a class in many cases very little raised above hired labourer, and more hardly worked and less well fed and housed. They are very numerous in many parts of the Fens. Cowbit is entirely composed of small freeholders, cultivating the land with the help of their children……They are established in these parts owing to the extreme fertility of the soil which well repays a garden cultivation.”
In my opinion the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a golden age for these fenmen as they acquired good quality land and grazing alongside their traditional activities, that were starting to wane. They increased their farming, horticulture , flowers and vegetables and the use of greenhouses saw the subsequent generations adapt to these opportunities. In such a way could they be a model for future entry level farmers to follow?
Equally market towns had a high degree of self-sufficiency with their own boot makers, foundries, blacksmiths, and a whole host of shops and trades that would require an internet search nowadays to locate.
Perhaps the greatest challenge for the Fens of today is to cope with the gap that now exists as market towns are now either dormitory or industrial towns and there are a dominant number of residents whose personal economies are largely divorced from the rural environment.
However, I believe the future of this area is economically positive provided the economy becomes focused upon the intertwining activities of food, water and energy, with the first requiring the other two for growing, rearing, processing, packing and distribution.
I believe that if the Fenland region allows itself to become a key resource for energy generation and distribution the supply of both the nation’s energy and the use of surplus cheap energy can establish a new era of horticulture, food growth and distribution. To do so requires great visionary thinking and establishment of infrastructure without barriers to growth.
In 1995 I attended a presentation on the proposed new gas power station to generate electricity on the site of the old Spalding Sugar Beet factory. They proposed that neighbouring businesses would be approached to use surplus heat from power generation to be piped for either heating or refrigeration purposes. There was no take up of this despite refrigeration being used. Whilst I do not understand the reasoning, not to have this as an essential use of surplus heat is a bad use of resources
A few years later I attend an open day at Decoy Farm near Crowland and part of that vision for the site was anaerobic digestors generating electricity but also the generation of heat for glasshouses adjacent to the site. Since then alternative proposals have been made for a shrimp farm. Whatever happens in the future I feel that this site will expand its power generation over time and we will see exciting and innovative development both here and elsewhere in the Fens. Smart, green electric generation and food production can go hand in hand. Just look at every food factory, packhouse and distribution hub in the area and in as I write vast areas of roof-space have been under-utilised when they could generate energy. Other businesses are retro-fitting solar panels at great expense. For example Tong engineering at Spilsby, retro-fitted solar panels on its factory roof. Smaller packhouses have done this also and switched forklifts from gas and diesel to electric power. But to really develop this grid capacity is a limiting factor, and this cannot be allowed to remain the case.
If you go back to my childhood in the 1970’s many small producers in outlying villages such as Weston Hills, Cowbit and Gedney Hill had glass houses. Flower growing and houseplant propagation could be seen under some glass and tomatoes and cucumbers under others. Because of the way markets worked it was possible for small producers to make a good living. This was the case from the 1930’s through to the 1970’s. But, the glasshouses in Fenland relied heavily upon oil for heating and the energy crisis of the 1970’s hit hard. Salad products fell by the way, with the margins on flowers being greater and able to absorb some of the cost within their margins. Elsewhere, in the Lea Valley, they benefitted from mains gas to heat glasshouses at lower cost and at larger scale produced salads. The niche smaller grower was from this point on fading as larger and more efficient economies of scale were used. In more recent times energy prices have made heated glasshouses unviable in many cases.
However, the value of innovation is seen in Dyson Farms that have anaerobic digesters at both Nocton Fen and Carrington, where heat generated from this activity powers commercial strawberry growing under glass – an added value crop in that it can be produced outside normal seasons. Energy generation and food growing and processing go hand in hand and the Fenland region is ideally located to exploit this.
The importance of glass has always been significant in the area since about 1905. It was, however, not mostly driven by food production, but by flower growing. In the period 1905 to 1909 flower production approximately doubled in the Holland county region and this was largely due to increased usage of glasshouses. The difference in the economy of growing food under glass and flowers is starkly illustrated by these figures from 1937:
Norfolk – total acreage of glasshouses 132 acres
Crops grown – 60% tomatoes, 31% flowers and plants, 6% cucumbers, 3% vegetables and other fruit.
Employment per acre of glass – 5.4 full time and 3.2 casual
Monetary value of output per acre of glass - £1,604
Holland division of Lincolnshire – total acreage of glasshouses 100 acres
Crops grown – 83% flowers and plants, 16% tomatoes, 1% other vegetables and fruit.
Employment per acre of glass – 21.6 full time and 16.6 casual
Monetary value of output per acre of glass - £4,844
This illustrates the financial reality of growing flowers vs. food and this has been a key issue. However, in a world of limited resources and expensive energy is it acceptable or ethical that this should be the case? The advantage of using capacity from electric power generation should be either reduced cost or better still a fixed cost enabling planning and investment in future production.
On the edge of Spalding is a large new glasshouse erected in recent years that makes use of biomass heating (wood chip). Talking to people at the site in 2019 it is clear that the glass was not fully utilised at its full potential due to the need of a new electric sub-station. I would like to say this is an isolated case, but since 2002 I have encountered seven developments that are either used under capacity or stalled due to grid limitations. This shows a profound lack of leadership and is in contrast to the infrastructure that was applied at pace by Spalding Urban District Council to establish its first Sugar Beet factory.
I find it telling that in my opinion when Spalding’s gas power station was proposed the people for the development tended to be businessmen of some form or another that, whilst acknowledging the opposition concerns as legitimate, took a pragmatic approach, whereby the opposition tended to be opposed to it on grounds of air pollution and the height of the structure in the flat landscape whilst ignoring the need for increased electricity supply. The reality is that the next generation of generator that would be suitable for this site would be nuclear. That this is possible and likely in my opinion is seen in the development by Rolls Royce of their small modular reactors.
This combined with anaerobic, solar and wind solutions will create further growth of the food industry in the area. The location north of London and East of the Midlands is well suited to distribution of food and energy in both directions.
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