Patrick Comerford
I spent time earlier this week with clerical colleagues from the Milton Keynes area at the Urb Farm, a three-acre market garden in Wolverton that produces and sells its own seasonal vegetables, fruit and honey.
The Urb Farm can be found between 196-198 Windsor Street in Wolverton. This is a horticultural social enterprise that nurtures the soil and grows organic produce for the local community all year round. With its trainees and volunteers, the farm maintains 25 large growing beds, five polytunnels, greenhouses, beehives and an orchard throughout the year. They grow a wide range of vegetables and fruit using environmentally sensitive techniques, working with the seasons and local climate.
The farm works with young people not in education, employment or training, and offers work experience while developing work skills within a framework that understands their individual needs.
The farm welcomes volunteers as part of the Urb Farm team, to enjoy the site and use their gifts, time and enthusiasm to learn more about growing vegetables and fruit and helping the Urb Farm to flourish and grow. Seasonal produce is grown at the Urb Farm market garden in the heart of Wolverton.
Milton Keynes Christian Foundation is an innovative local charity growing people and community through social enterprise. Our eight exciting enterprises work to ‘co-produce’ solutions to locally identified issues that have a global importance.
The enterprises are staffed by teams of young people who have struggled with mainstream education. Their enterprise work experience is supported by accredited training enabling trainees to build confidence and make good choices for the next steps in life.
The Urb Farm has its roots in the Christian community, but we were told how it works with people of all faiths and none, celebrating diversity and welcoming people from all parts of the community. Milton Keynes Christian Foundation runs a number of social enterprises and services from and Foundation House. As well as the urban farm in Wolverton, these include: the Learning Foundation, offering an alternative to school or college; Childcare Pathways, a nursery social enterprise in the heart of Wolverton; Think Food, a small café with a big vision; Cycle Saviours, saving, refurbishing, repairing, servicing and selling bikes and making cycling accessible to all; Urban Bee-lievers’, making Milton Keynes a bee-friendly city.
I was interested in particular in Urban Beelievers, an exciting social enterprise that finds ways to encourage, educate and inspire people to make Milton Keynes a bee-friendly city. The farm looks after thousands of honey bees across the city in company gardens, roof tops and school grounds as well as at the Urban Farm.
The farm helps create homes for bumble bees and solitary bees as well as plants, flowers and trees that provide food for bees, it runs workshops on all things honey and bee related and produces useful and beautiful products using wax and honey.
The UK has already lost 11 species of bee with 35 species of the 250 left being under threat. Bees pollinate 75% of our food crops like apples and tomatoes, and the farm invited people to help them to look after bees and to stop their decline.
The farm invites people to learn more about bees, helping to create a city full of bee food flowers and places for them to live and thrive. People are welcome to join an Urban Bee-lievers beekeeper experience and to learn about becoming beekeepers. During the three-hour Beekeeping Experience course, which costs £60, participants learn about the honeybee colony, how to care for the bees, get hands-on experience and taste the honey.
We heard how Milton Keynes Christian Foundation and Sector Ministry was established by the local Christian community and continues to be part of. It emerged from the Church’s ecumenical adventures in the growing new town of Milton Keynes. As churches found new ways to work with each other, they also sought to develop innovative patterns of working with the emerging communities, exploring new meanings of ‘being church’ and new patterns of ministry.
From humble beginnings in a Methodist church hall in Wolverton, the Christian Foundation was born, inspired by the values of the Christian faith. The foundation is committed to learning from communities and with others about how to challenge disadvantage, exclusion, injustice and the abuse of the environment. With its faith perspective, it sees these activities as signs of God’s activity in the community.
One strand of these explorations was developed by a team of ‘Sector Ministers’ who came together in the early 1980s, and the Christian Foundation was one of these ventures. The focus has been on the everyday sectors of life, such as work, education, business, health, family, community and environment.
Over the years, the foundation has engaged with many local issues, including waste and recycling; unemployment and training; teenage pregnancy and period poverty; childcare and play; education and school exclusion; food security and healthy eating; affordable housing and homelessness; regeneration and community cohesion; transport and cycling; renewable energy and climate change.
It continues to be involved with many of these issues, but more recently it has found social enterprise offers a new and creative way to work with them. The enterprises offer opportunities for working on demanding common tasks, enabling young people and others to co-create their futures, ‘learning, changing and growing’.
The Urb Farm also works in partnership with companies across Milton Keynes and welcomes teams to enjoy the farm site for team-building experiences or to make the most of their volunteer days. Others sponsor or host a beehive, enjoy pop-up shops for staff events and office-based Christmas fairs and workshops in growing veg or honey tasting.
As Milton Keynes Christian Foundation marks its 40th year, it is celebrating all it has been achieved and is looking ahead with hope. It sees this milestone as an opportunity to renew bonds with the local churches. A thanksgiving celebration takes place at the Urb Farm at 4 pm next Friday (17 July 2026). It is planned as a joyful occasion to meet young people, staff, and volunteers, to celebrate together, and to explore how this shared mission can continue in the years ahead.
• All produce at Urb Farm is cultivated on site with zero food miles from field to market. Veg Bags can be bought on the shop section on the website, and collected from the farm. The weekly market is open every Tuesday from 10 am to 4 pm and the second and fourth Saturdays of the month from 10 am to 1 pm.
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