Former Tivoli Road Bakery owners Pippa and Michael James have launched a new initiative, Urbanstead, that aims to educate and inspire people about the food they consume.

We caught up with the duo to talk about where the concept first began, the launch of their latest cookbook Sweet Seasons, and what the next few years hold for them. Hint: it involves some more Grainz events.

Can you tell us a bit about Urbanstead?

With Urbanstead, our goal is to share skills and information about food and food systems.

Primarily, we want to empower people to eat better, both for health and for pleasure. We’ve been feeding people for many years. We still love seeing someone’s face light up when they bite into something wonderful, and we wanted to create a way for that joy to ripple out via many hands. When people come to our classes, they get so excited that they can transform simple ingredients into such deliciousness. It changes the way they think about food, and they go away feeling more confident.

We also encourage people to consider the impact of their food purchasing decisions on their communities and beyond.

Where did the idea for Urbanstead come from?

It comes from a combination of our skills and experience, and is also an expression of the way we want to be in the world.

The name is a play on Homestead, which describes a lifestyle of self sufficiency. A homesteader grows their own fruit and vegetables, milks their own cow, has chickens for eggs, and perhaps some other animals for meat. It’s very romantic but it’s not realistic for many people. Most people now live in urban environments, and they can’t do all the things. But if we each build some skills and educate ourselves, we can create communities that are more resilient to the challenges that are coming.

How long has the concept been in the works for?

It formed slowly, over several years. We sold Tivoli Road Bakery at the end of 2018, and have been mulling over ideas ever since. We’ve each done some study, we’ve travelled and we’ve had lots of conversations with people working in food. It just kind of emerged from that time of reflection.

At the heart of Urbanstead is the concept “through education and experience we explore the transformative potential of food, both for people and the planet.” Why do you believe this is something we should be embracing?

Our food systems are responsible for great social and environmental destruction. Take supermarkets as an example – they give us the illusion of choice, but their purchasing policies reduce the diversity of plants grown for food, drive farmers to suicide and concentrate wealth in the hands of a few, diverting money out of local economies. Or food waste, which produces 10 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions while some people struggle to feed their families.

It’s very scary when you start learning about what’s happening, but there are simple things everyone can do to make positive choices, like growing herbs on a windowsill, getting to know where their food comes from, or including more whole grains in their baking. Every food purchase is a vote for the future we want to create. If we can inspire people to engage with this issue in a way that’s accessible, fun, and empowering, that’s our job done.

As part of Urbanstead you’re both also running baking classes. What will these involve?

You can choose a class on sourdough bread-making, sweet baking from our new book or Christmas baking, and there will be more classes up and running in 2025. We’re keeping the classes small so they’re really hands on and there’s lots of opportunity for questions. They’re suitable for beginners but experienced bakers will also enjoy and benefit from them. They run for five hours, so we cover a lot. We share a nice lunch and people get to take all their bakes home.

It’s a really lovely way to spend a day!

What will the next few months hold for both yourselves and Urbanstead?

Our third book, Sweet Seasons, was launched in September, so we’ve been very busy promoting that here, and also in the UK and Japan. Now it’s nice to be home and returning to some kind of normal! We have three remaining classes scheduled to the end of this year, and are currently developing our class schedule for 2025. This will be available soon on our website.

Anything else you’d like to add?

We love to engage with the baking community. You can find us at Grainz events, which are a great way to meet and learn from wonderful bakers, grain growers and millers (plus they’re really fun!)

We’d love to hear from anyone with questions or requests.