The high street in New Addington, south Croydon is one of the unhealthiest in London. Dotted between a launderette and a betting agent on a small curved parade are 10 fast food takeaways. There will soon be 11.

In the borough of Croydon there are 424 fast food shops, which predominantly sell calorific and unhealthy food such as fried chicken and burgers, according to data released by Public Health England last year. It has the second highest amount in London, after Westminster.

Obesity is a problem in Croydon. New figures show that hospital admissions due to obesity have risen almost 90% in a year, according to NHS Digital. As with the rest of the UK, it is especially prevalent in areas of deprivation. New Addington is among the most deprived areas in Croydon and residents have poor long-term health outcomes. One in four children is obese.

All is not lost, however. In among the proliferation of fast food outlets, on the edge of the New Addington estate, a group of local residents are tucking into home-baked bread and salad. Many of the ingredients were grown on the one and half acres of biodiverse green space that forms part of the Good Food Matters community food learning centre. Inside is a spacious teaching kitchen that holds cooking classes and nutrition lessons for the local community.

Good Food Matters is the brainchild of Evelyn Findlater, who was this year awarded an MBE for her services to food education, and believes the root course of the country’s obesity epidemic is that people no longer know how to cook or manage their food budgets in the face of cheap – and unhealthy – options. Findlater says: “Some of [the participants] only have £25 a week to spend on food. In the supermarket, packets of biscuits are cheaper than bananas, and people just grab fried chicken as a way to fill them up cheaply.”

The innovative centre has been at the forefront of a borough-wide programme funded by Croydon council, Mayor of London and Department for Education to tackle obesity. Along with Lambeth, Croydon was chosen by the Greater London Authority to be London’s first food flagship borough to deliver projects between 2014 and 2017 to tackle the issue and support families to live longer and healthier lives.

More than 300 residents have attended cooking, nutrition or horticultural courses so far. Participants reported increased confidence in cooking skills; better management of food budgets and a greater willingness to try new healthy foods. Three in four reported eating fewer takeaway meals as a result. One participant says: “I was drinking six to eight Red Bulls a day, along with my son, and mainly eating takeaways. I have now made quite a few changes to my whole diet and feel a lot better in myself, both mentally and physically.”

Daisy Lennon, a mother of three, who lives locally adds: “It made me think about cooking healthier options and in healthier ways. Before if I was making cakes I would use loads of sugar and white flour; now I can make healthier versions. And I can make sweet potato wedges with breaded mackerel in the oven whereas before I would go out to get fish and chips, which is all fried.”

Although the Mayor of London’s food adviser, Rosie Boycott, hailed the food flagship programme a success, Ashley Brown, the public health principal for Croydon council who managed it, says the long term outcomes of the project are not yet known. She says: “Our aim was to have a whole systems approach to see how we could tackle obesity in the long term. We knew we weren’t going to tackle it in three years but we wanted to look at the bigger picture.”

One way to do this is to develop strong relationships with local GPs, which Brown admits is a challenge. She says: “We often miss people and we know that healthcare providers are so busy, they don’t always have the time to refer people. One of the elements we trialled was social prescription and getting GPs to signpost people to projects.”

Agnelo Fernandes, a GP in Thornton Heath in Croydon and the clinical chair of Croydon clinical commissioning group says working in partnership with local authorities and the voluntary sector has been crucial. “We need to harness what’s going on and learn from what is working well so these things can be spread,” he says.

With the NHS under increasing strain, GPs need to try new things. Fernandes adds: “The reason I got so involved in the first place was because I was seeing how much our workload was increasing. The NHS doesn’t have enough resources to keep up. It’s not just about galvanising the public, but also the healthcare professionals. We need to incentivise them to do something positive about the problem and we need to think about how to take healthcare into the community.”

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