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. “My interest – and it runs through me like a stick of rock,” she says, “is not the environment but social justice. How do we give people fair and equal access to housing that includes green space?” A chair of her local Labour Party association for two years, Gemma speaks of, “disrupting the market economy around placemaking and development for profit”, by means of the highly successful green infrastructure benchmark she has devised as founder-director of Building with Nature.
This is a voluntary set of guidelines for developers seeking to realise a measurable 10 per cent increase in biodiversity net gain, which is set to become written into law later this year. Its three prongs might be summarised as: wildlife, water and wellbeing — all of them, and especially the last, being tricky to assess objectively. Which is where the benchmark comes in.
Gemma paints a picture of living off-grid, “climbing trees and swimming in rivers”. Scratch a little deeper and she reveals that in fact she spent a lot of time walking the dogs, cooking, digging the garden
Growing up in Manchester, Gemma came to know nature by playing out in the streets and in nearby Crumpsall Park. “If you’re from Manchester, it matters where you’re from, and I’m from the poor bit,” she explains. “It’s a very hard landscape, but these pockets of nature became my whole world.” Now 38, she describes herself as being the recipient of “the last ‘assisted place’ before the Labour Party abolished it” – 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 “swot”, she got a place to read social anthropology at Edinburgh University, choosing the course because “I didn’t know what I wanted to do”. Not surprisingly, perhaps, she dropped out after a year and went off to live at a smallholding just outside the city.
Gemma paints a picture of living off-grid, “climbing trees and swimming in rivers”. 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 – as the youngest – “being treated like a bit of a dogsbody”. (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.
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, “the quality of planning applications was not improving”, so something else was needed.
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 in Liverpool. At that point, she says, “I could have put all my energy into my business, but because of growing up in poverty, I wasn’t ready to be a freelancer, chasing projects all the time.”
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, “the quality of [planning] applications was not improving”, so something else was needed.
As for horticulture, Gemma’s answer to the question, ‘Should people be given their own gardens?’ is perhaps surprising: “No! If anything, the opposite. If you can have high-quality public gardens, parks or ‘meanwhile spaces’, then I think it reduces the need for gardens.”
It’s 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 ‘anti-garden’ 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.
Here then, is an idealist, but also, crucially, a pragmatist. On Gemma Jerome’s watch, things get done. And that is greatly to the benefit of the wider ecological movement.
USEFUL INFORMATION Find out more about the Building with Nature initiative at buildingwithnature.org.uk