Level six: carrots, by Esther Kimani

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The lift in the Market Street multistorey car park stops at level five. To reach level six you climb a concrete staircase that smells faintly of petrol, push open a fire door, and step into a garden.

Until three years ago the top deck was used by about a dozen cars a day. The council, which owns the building, agreed to let a residents’ group take over half of it. There was one condition: the structure was never designed to carry the weight of real soil, so every bed had to be built inside a lightweight plastic crate filled with a special compost mixed with crushed volcanic rock. There are now one hundred and forty crates, each rented for £15 a year, and the waiting list for a crate has reached ninety names.

Most of the growers live in flats in the streets below, and few of them have ever had a garden. Mrs Qureshi, who is seventy-eight, grows coriander, chillies and a row of carrots, and climbs the six flights twice a week. ‘My doctor is very pleased with the stairs,’ she says.

The group meets on the first Saturday of each month to share seeds and fix the water tanks. Cars still park on the other half of the deck, and their drivers often stop to look over the low fence before they head for the lift.

(a) How much does it cost to rent a crate for a year? (b) Why did every bed have to be built inside a lightweight crate? (c) What does the waiting list suggest about the rooftop garden?