Help the Hungry: Inside our social kitchen as we get set to tackle food poverty

‘We needed to be at the heart of the community,’ The Felix Project’s Mark Curtin says

Inside the proposed site in Tower Hamlets for The Felix Project’s kitchen (Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd)

It is cold, it is dark, and it is – for the most part – completely empty; but a gloomy industrial lot in east London in just a few months’ time will serve as the home of a food-poverty-busting operation that will see thousands of people cooked nutritious meals every day.

The site in Tower Hamlets is the planned home for our new social kitchen, which is a lasting legacy of our Help the Hungry campaign's goal to tackle hunger in the capital alongside charity partner The Felix Project.

The development is possible due to the generosity of The Independent’s readers, who responded in such huge numbers to give to our appeal, and the Dispossessed Fund set up by our sister title, the Evening Standard, which has donated £1m to set up the kitchen.

Once open, it is intended that some 1.5 million meals a year will be distributed from this site – all powered by volunteers working in the shadow of the financial hub of Canary Wharf, in the capital’s most impoverished borough.

In each case the meals will be made at the kitchen before being distributed to those facing food poverty across London, where they can be heated up in people’s own homes.

“We were looking for a space in east London because we needed to be at the heart of the community,” Mark Curtin, CEO of The Felix Project, said.

Originally the charity was just looking for a new distribution depot. Settling on a warehouse location in Poplar, they decided to look at the lot next door to see if they could maximise the space – instead discovering the bare bones of a catering operation.

“We looked at it with the intention to see if we could make the depot even bigger than we were planning to,” Mr Curtin said. “But then we realised it was a disused professional dark kitchen, and then the idea was born.”

The ambition now is to create a site that is not just capable of processing vast amounts of reclaimed food, as is done at Felix’s other locations, but also cooking and sending out fully formed meals to those in need.

Shane Dorsett, project manager, and Mark Curtin, CEO, at the proposed site for the London Kitchen (Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd)

This will allow them to make use of even more surplus food, such as liquid egg or industrial quantities of onions, that have proved tricky to redistribute. It will also mean they can meet specific needs like the hunger crisis in school holidays, which last year saw community groups and hospitality operations across the city serve up replacements for free school lunches when the government declined to do so.

The creation of our new social kitchen is a key part of how our Help The Hungry appeal has sought not only to provide emergency food to those worst hit by the pandemic, but also to create long-lasting solutions to try to alleviate food poverty.

However there is still work to be done – and the challenge of overhauling the kitchen to make it fit for purpose remains a huge one. Running the site in the first year alone is likely to cost in the region of £1m.

Mr Curtin said: “We want this kitchen to be a world-class kitchen and to produce world-class food, so it will be expensive to fit out – then we’ve got to run and operate the kitchen itself.”

Corporate supporters wishing to help fund the social kitchen should contact fundraising@thefelixproject.org