London’s wholesale food markets are of such venerable antiquity that New Spitalfields, a fruit and vegetable market that “started life in the thirteenth century in a field next to St Mary Spittel on the edge of the Square Mile,” can be casually described as “one of the City’s younger markets.” IMAGE: Traders at New Spitalfields […]

A beehive is the urban roof accessory du jour, even more popular than its eco-friendly cousins, solar panels or greenery. New York City’s Waldorf Astoria hotel is only the most recent to join a trend that includes roofs from the Paris Opéra to Chicago’s City Hall, as high-end chefs, locavores, and urban homesteaders alike enjoy the taste of honey made from trees and flowers in their own neighbourhood.

Underneath the pubs, shops, houses, and office buildings of Nottingham lie more than five hundred man-made caves, carved into the city’s soft sandstone bedrock over a thousand years, and now largely abandoned and forgotten. IMAGE: Geoff Manaugh, Ellis and Mark Smout, and David Strange-Walker exploring a former sand mine cave. Photo by Nicola Twilley. Last […]

IMAGE: Soil samples (the darker ones are carbon-stained), via. In the United States, soil protection is typically discussed in terms of erosion. Through a model law disseminated during the 1930s Dust Bowl, states were encouraged to create soil conservation districts with the authority to plan and carry out irrigation, drainage, and erosion control programmes, and […]