Close to Chingford Station in the suburbs of east London and along a path leading into Epping Forest, large iron gates stand at the entrance to Hawkwood Plant Nursery. Rows of fruit and vegetables are planted all around. Fields replete with raised beds and a forest garden provide the backdrop to a large glasshouse connected to a main building, from where the community food project Organic Lea is run.

Back in 2001, Ru Litherland was one of the founders turning the key in the lock of the old, creaking iron gate. ‘It was political from the beginning,’ he says today. ‘The realisation that we were disconnected from the food system, from food distribution, was beginning to dawn on people… We wanted to reclaim it.’

Organic Lea is not bound by conventional norms. The vision found here, in this slice of rural utopia on the edge of the capital city, this haven of carrots and communism, is directly at odds with the approach taken in Westminster or in most corporate boardrooms across the country. Established by a group of activists coming out of the global justice movement of the late 1990s, Organic Lea is a workers’ cooperative, with 23 members who are also directors of the company holding an equal say in how it is run.

One day in early summer last year, I came here to talk to workers and volunteers about what they do differently and about how, over the course of more than two decades, a group of people committed to equality have sought to turn traditional ideas about top-down leadership on their head.

These questions feel vital right now. Even a cursory look at Britain today reveals a land in which work is not working and in which trust in bosses and leaders is at an all-time low. Inequality is growing, real wages are falling, and the holes in Britain’s social safety nets grow ever more gaping. Work-related stress is rampant, with one poll finding that only one percent of employees had never experienced it.

And yet this landscape is often seen as a fact of life. The same can be said of our five-day working week, of the impossibility of juggling employment and childcare or the fact that so many workers are stuck in what the late anthropologist David Graeber dubbed ‘bullshit jobs’.

What is it like to be in an environment that seeks to address these problems? As I plant globe artichokes in the sunshine with three other volunteers, they all tell me a similar story: they work — or used to work — in offices. This work leaves them feeling alienated. They don’t trust the people telling them what to do and they aren’t sure if they are doing any good. ‘One day, I just had enough,’ says Kirsty Bennett, who worked in the charity sector for 20 years. When she is at Organic Lea, she feels something very different.

‘Ten years ago, I lost my partner,’ says the usually jovial Sandra Palmer, wearing a Chelsea Football Club shirt. ‘I came here and I listened, the way everyone else did. And now I devote my entire life here.’ Every Wednesday, Palmer gets paid to clean the toilets. ‘And I charge everyone who comes in,’ she tells me, cackling.

Clifford, her 29-year-old son, is with her. He has autism and his mother is his sole carer. ‘He’s got no social worker and I’ve lost my carers’ allowance,’ Palmer says, as we eat lunch, which is made onsite. Every week, Clifford reports to the job centre. ‘All he wants is to stack shelves, but they are doing nothing for him,’ Palmer says. ‘We don’t live in a caring world, but this place has become our family.’ She gestures to the tables around us, the fields and rows of vegetables beyond.

This feeling of community and family is one that Clare Joy, one of the founders of Organic Lea, recognises and seeks to foster by ‘looking to catch people’s interest in the everyday’. At the turn of the century, Joy was working in Ghana campaigning against the construction of a new oil pipeline when a colleague asked her what was happening back in Britain. ‘I couldn’t answer them,’ she says, and so she went home and started growing things. ‘If you want to change the world, an allotment is a good place to start.’

Organic Lea makes 70 percent of its income from its vegetable box scheme, which delivers to almost 1000 customers around London, and from training and courses in horticulture. The rest comes from grants. The 23 members of the co-operative are divided roughly equally according to the job they do: five are predominantly growers, five work on the distribution side, five are in community learning, four or five help other gardens and children with special educational needs and the rest do administrative support.

In the warm glow of the glasshouse, Ru Litherland sits to take a break, rows of plants and vegetables all around. A prolific chronicler of over two decades of life at Organic Lea on his ‘grower’s blog’, Litherland also wrote an account of what happens here for the Guardian headlined, ‘Carrots and communism: the allotments plotting a food revolution.’ He tells me that the cultivation of this part of the River Lea’s valley goes back to the sixth century, when the Saxons settled and worked the land.

At the end of the ninth century, Danes who had sailed up the Lea established the first market gardens in the area, which continued to play a vital role in the production of vegetables up into the 19th century — when London’s oldest allotments were introduced here — and on into the 20th century, with the peak of Lea Valley production coming during the Second World War.

Litherland has written that from their very beginning in the Victorian period, when land was given to the labouring poor for growing food, allotments have ‘provided a space for recreation and an alternative to industrial capitalism’. This keen sense of history applies to the unusual, as well as the political. While cucumbers, tomatoes and other fresh produce were dispatched to the markets of central London, the city’s bodily waste came back the other way on barges, fertilising the ground. This, Litherland tells me, is where the phrase ‘taking the piss’ originates: barge drivers taking the capital’s piss and shit back up the river would make up a story about the shameful cargo they were carrying.

‘For a long time, I tried to avoid the term leadership because of being disenfranchised by leaders and seeing how they had failed us on environmental issues,’ Litherland says. Leaders were men who ‘thwarted fairness and equality’, and as such he wanted to avoid being like them. He thought carefully — perhaps even painfully — about how to avoid falling into the trap of being the white man who thinks he knows best and who ends up dominating others.

‘We have a certain authority because we are founders,’ he says of himself and Joy, ‘so it’s an interesting dynamic. I have traditional authority as an elder. If this is accountable and nameable, then I think it’s OK.’ The standard joke about cooperatives and other kinds of egalitarian enterprises is that everyone (and no one) is in charge and nothing ever gets done (‘I ran an all-women’s theatre company, everyone was a vice president,’ observes Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon in the comedy series 30 Rock).

For the 23-member cooperative at Organic Lea, strategy is determined at group meetings held every six weeks, where everyone discusses and votes on different issues that need to be resolved. Anyone can veto, but if there is only one veto, that person has two or three meetings at which to convince others to join them before the issue is decided by a majority vote.

‘In my old work, the solutions were never there. Whereas here, it’s very solutions-based, you just discuss it with someone and then you work it out,’ says Chris Manahan, who has been the head chef at Organic Lea since 2017, after working for many years across communities in east London. ‘I have great conversations in the kitchen. I get feedback from everyone. I’m letting go of the need to be acknowledged.’ 

Standing in the kitchen, his dreadlocks contained in a hat, Manahan is making a gardeners’ pie with spiced green lentils, leeks, onions and cauliflower leaves. Cabbage, bulghur wheat and scotch bonnet with chilli jam are also in the mix. ‘I did youth work, mental health work — working in supported living situations,’ he says. ‘What I found was that the system is toxic. There were a lot of frustrated kids, a lot of anger. A lack of open space and a lack of green space. Young men need places to go and a lot of them feel purposeless. It doesn’t matter what race you are, it’s all very similar, the same anger.’

Manahan had always dreamt of being a cook and had always felt a connection to the land. ‘I’m from a Jamaican family. I’m quite into growing. One side of my family still lives in rural Jamaica. I yearned for that: people sharing things, not money,’ he says. ‘I longed for communalism but didn’t know where to find it.’ Then he started volunteering at Organic Lea. Soon he was working in the kitchen, then he was running it. Having worked with ‘troubled boys who were the victims of hierarchies’, Manahan found himself in a place where everyone was listened to, but where things still happened.

The kinds of boys and girls Manahan used to encounter working in the youth system also come to Organic Lea, and the chef notices the effect the environment has on them. He looks out of the kitchen’s window, at this land that has remained productive for 1,500 years, through times of war and times of peace. ‘There’s no better lesson than the ground,’ Manahan tells me. ‘Things don’t get lost here. It feels like magic.’