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Islington is one of the boroughs with the least green space in London, and Octopus Communities love nothing more than collaborating with local communities to identify unloved and underused spaces with the aim of transforming them into community gardening and food growing spaces.
The We Can Grow Project was funded from October 2016 to March 2020 through the Big Lottery Reaching Communities Fund as an extension of the highly successful Urban Wild Places Project which ran from 2013 -16.
We Can Grow builds on our previous activities and research to galvanize community action to develop and enhance underused / unloved green spaces on estates and in parks through environmental and food growing activities. The project started in October 2016 with an event held jointly with the launch of Islington in Bloom, with 80 participants.
This site provides an evaluation of the project through a set of stories, told here with photos and videos, and a connections map showing how urban growing helped develop relationships over three years.
Community Garden Stories
Community Garden Stories
The Whittington Park Community Centre wanted to increase the gardening opportunities for its elderly users and to grow fresh food for the café.
Young people and volunteers have worked together to design, develop and maintain a "Wild and Green" community nature garden.
The Bloomin' Gardeners community group has transformed part of Caledonian Park from dull amenity planting to a beautiful pollinator friendly flower garden.
Local residents and the Octopus team transformed a disused games area on the Andover Estate into a short-term plant nursery.
Community engagement sessions on the Tufnell Park Estate built a group able negotiate a five-year license from Islington’s Homes and Communities, and development of a longer-term nursery.
The garden enables local people to improve their environment, their own health and well-being, and grow food.
This network map shows the working relationships between the projects, groups, organisations and partners that have worked over the last 3.5 years to create the Urban Wild Places - We Can Grow programme. All activities and connections shown in this map link back to Octopus Urban Wild Places - We Can Grow project as the initiator of any activity and in making the connection.
Go to the map page and click 1 in the blank pane to activate the map.
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