Seven days (almost) living off-grid in London

Can a confirmed city-dweller shake the shackles of modern convenience culture and live off-grid in London for a week? I was going to find out. I initially proposed to spend a week off-grid. Go hard or go home, I thought. So I took the model to the rest of the house. No electricity, no gas. I kept the water on.

The idea was exploring how much we can divest ourselves of convenience culture and adopt a greater sense of community while still doing everything we normally do. Low-impact living, not no-impact. My biggest cheat was keeping one plug in the house on for the wireless router. I was off-grid, but I also needed to work.

Those of us who have experienced any sort of mass power outage know that gulp of “uh-oh”. Everything you rely on to work suddenly doesn’t. No instant light, no cups of tea from the electric kettle and – gasp – no internet.

Day one

Turned everything off at the source. Silence. No fridge. No boiler. Breakfast took two hours by putting a whistling kettle on the barbecue and grinding coffee beans by hand. I started sprout production and knewI could eat nettles and dandelion leaves.

Although it was off, the fridge was still cold. I decided not to open it until I’d made an evaporative cooler out of two different-sized unglazed terracotta pots, some towels and sand borrowed from a children’s playground. You put one pot inside the other and fill the gap with sand. Then you soak the sand and lay a wet towel on top. Nature sucks the hot air out through evaporation. It’s not as cold as the fridges we’re used to but it’s enough to keep things from going off. It was tiny.

I got some scallops from a local fishmonger, stir-fried stinging nettles and dandelion leaves in an iron pot and made couscous by leaving it to cook in boiled water with a wedge of butter. Dinner would be everything else that would go off in the fridge.

Day two

Unless I was going to live on takeaways, I had to learn more efficient ways of cooking. Enter Cath Prisk, who runs a project and a shop called Outdoor People.

“The key to surviving anything is knowing how to start a fire and find clean water,” she says. She kitted me out with a simple hobo stove, a storm kettle, firelighters and a flint steel – I can now cook and heat water with foraged twigs from the local park.

“Hobo stoves are good but you’d cook more sustainably with a rocket stove because the way its designed lets you keep a fire going on a very small amount of wood. It combusts efficiently - which is why it is used in many poor countries,” says Wild Stoves’ Jonathan Rouse.

Day three

I wasn’t going wild man of the woods. I was in London and there is urban waste I can turn into resources – like FoodCycle, which takes and cooks surplus food. I juiced a bag of oranges I picked up for 40p. Nutritionist Tea Novo came over to give me a quick lesson on fermenting.

“I come at this from a health angle. Fermenting encourages bacteria that’s great for your gut,” says Novo. “I’m a single mum and none of the food at home is processed. Mostly everything is fresh or can be preserved and fermented for a fraction of what things cost in a supermarket. It’s not time-consuming because once you have a system going, these foods prepare themselves.”

I heated up some beans in a tin on the hobo stove and had that with leftover kielbasa and some sauerkraut that Novo had left me. I tried not to get depressed about the jar of seeds I was trying to sprout that fell in the sink. The struggle was real.

Day four

Urban foraging. Some friends in a central London squat showed me how to skip. It’s not eating from a bin if you know what time shops lay out their surplus food for collection. That night we dined on sushi and cupcakes which were for sale on the shelves minutes before we arrived.

“People have a funny relationship with food,” said one of the squatters. “It’s totally fine to eat something you’ve paid seven quid for at 6.55pm but not fine to eat it once it’s gone out in a binbag at 7.05pm. As squatters, we live on the scraps of capitalism’s table, from the buildings we occupy to the food we eat.”

Day five

Today I baked my first ever loaf of bread in a dutch oven I made out of a Le Creuset pot. (Stick it on the barbecue and put hot coals on top). My alfalfa sprouts also came through. Although I wasn’t using gas or electricity to run the barbecue, burning charcoal wasn’t a great option. Lump charcoal adds to greenhouse gas emissions and its production contributes to deforestation. Wood and coal also burn “dirty” - producing hydrocarbons that arent’ too good for your lungs.

Day six

The penultimate day. Using all the skills learned in the week, I started making kimchee and soaked some lentils for the next evening’s dinner party.

Day seven

Up out and early to meet Jon the Poacher, a 38-year-old who’s made a living foraging and hunting around Hackney’s Lea Valley.

“I’ve been doing this since I was a kid when I used to go fishing,” says Jon. “It’s partly because I can now make a living from supplying kitchens and working with breweries. I can stick two fingers up at supermarkets and keep a connection with the land. London is still very wild and you can find anything if you know what to look for.”

Along canal hedges, in city parks and under pylons we found the evening’s feast – wood sorrel, wild garlic, jack of the hedge, jew’s ear fungi, chickweed, St. George’s mushrooms, wild fennel, rocket, gorse and horseradish.

We called in on the Robin Hood community garden and spoke to KatherineJackson, one of its founders. “Anyone can use the garden,” she stressed. “We grow and we sow, and doing this as a group gives us a bond. Families save money and kids learn where food really comes from.”

Dinner was served. It was by candlelight and rather nice. We had home-baked wild fennel, sultana and olive bread, kimchee, daal spiced with homemade garam masala, couscous with sultanas, spiralised courgette and carrot from market surplus, a sauté of everything green and fungi we picked that day and freshly squeezed orange juice.

What did I learn?

Washing up with cold water is okay if you use lemons to help degrease. I actually like cold showers and handwashing your smalls in the sink like an Aussie backpacker isn’t such a bad thing. I learned that no matter how busy you think you are, you always have time to reach out to others.

Unplugging from the grid isn’t hard work – it just involves planning, having the right bit of kit, sharing knowledge and being open to new things.

The sustainable living hub is funded by Unilever. All content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled brought to you by. Find out more here.

Join the community of sustainability professionals and experts. Become a GSB member to get more stories like this direct to your inbox.