What's happening?

We are a community kitchen garden on St John's Estate in Hackney – a mature garden open to all residents to grow food, chat with neighbours or have some peace and quiet. Suddenly our lovely community space supported over the years by many groups but especially Hackney Council is under threat of demolition by, amazingly, Hackney Council. It means so much to us that we're fighting back to preserve this precious, irreplaceable space.

Our story

On Mothers' Day 2010, we cut the first turf in the triangle of grass behind our community hall. Soon after, 15 tons of processed food waste landed at the bottom of New North Road and we barrowed it into a steaming nutritious mountain.

Over the first years, with the help of Volker Highways, teams from City banks, Good Gym, and Growing Concerns we planted a hedge of fruit tree whips. With railway sleepers donated by National Rail, we built beds for residents to grow veg in.

Somehow, those whips have become tall, cooling trees laden with apples, apricots and plums. Residents are growing veg and herbs for their families. The garden has become a sanctuary – for creatures, plants and people alike.

Most recently we applied for funding from Hackney Council and through an initiative by No Plant Left Behind, the garden gained a beautiful social space in the form of a pergola which has already been used for several events. The fingers of a grapevine – a gift from a resident's mum 14 years ago - reached over from the railings to the pergola and they are now entwined. It feels like a moment of community solidarity and quiet triumph.

The 'Development'

A team led by Hackney Council's Regeneration & Development department together with private consultants, architects, and landscapers drew up plans that might destroy the garden, without us knowing.

They heard our objections but forged ahead with the flimsiest of 'community consultations', and zero dialogue with us, with plans to build a 6-storey block of mostly social housing right on the Community Hall and Kitchen Garden. They planned to 'move' the garden and hall.

We told them that you can't move a mature garden and described just why it would destroy the work of 16 years. They heard our passionate objection to this possibility in a meeting in December where we were supported by Councillors who have helped our project since that first day in 2010.

At a meeting this June, the developers doubled down on plans to build directly on the garden, promising to keep some trees at the edge but destroying the beds and benches and many shrubs and trees, including memorial trees. Their landscape architects designed a new garden on another site. They are now forging ahead with a very skewed consultation (16 people attended one, 10 another). Somehow Hackney's Green-led council has recently approved this at pre-planning stage.

Our Response

We are completely behind the building of proper new social housing and we have had three new blocks (a mix of social and 'affordable') built on our estate over the last 8 years. This is positive, but we feel and know first-hand the negative impacts.

Residents now look out onto massive brick walls just six meters away from their kitchen windows. Existing blocks have been long neglected, with constant leaks, broken doors, windows which fall out, and damp and black mould. Concrete is literally crumbling from old blocks into the new landscaping. Nothing has been invested in the existing housing stock and community.

Sadly, the new development instantly creates a two-tier Estate. Our community hall – given to us in the 1970s - was refurbished then swiftly taken from us by Hackney Council who now rent it out commercially. We can't afford to use it.

The only community asset we do have is the garden. Though small, it is open to all residents to grow food or simply come for solace or plain fresh air. This is particularly important as most flats have no outdoor space and many have spoken of the garden's mental health benefits.

We firmly believe the garden cannot be moved. You cannot separate the fruit trees from the beds, you cannot move the special plants and unique shrubs and you cannot replace the special biosphere buzzing with bees, hoverflies, crawling with invertebrates and croaking with frogs, just as you cannot move the complex precious personal history woven into every leaf of this site.

Those of us who have worked and worked to keep this alive and struggled and bonded over the years don't have it in us to start again. The garden would die at a human level too.

The professional replacement 'community garden' is an invention that misses the whole point. It is a computer drawing – a fantasy imagined over, above and despite us, not with us.

Our garden is real and alive and we're digging in to defend it. It will be hoes versus diggers and amateurs against the well-paid. Nearly everyone we speak with, especially those who like us support new social housing and love green spaces, see it as a massive wrong move for a Green-led council. Destroying this irreplaceable green and social sanctuary is not a good look.

There simply has to be an alternative. We want one to be found.

How to help

Spread the word please!

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