Enhancing local spaces
/ May 2026At the end of October last year we awarded funding to Archbishop's Park Community Trust. Archbishop's Park is a 3.77-hectare public green space located in central London, directly south of Waterloo Station and adjacent to Lambeth Palace and St Thomas' Hospital. The Trust has been working in Archbishop's Park for over 20 years. They maintain various areas, including a pond, woodland walk, meadow, community orchard and apiary, with the aim of creating attractive and accessible areas that improve biodiversity. Their main focus, however, is on health, wellbeing. They were awarded a grant towards the purchase of plants for their weekly gardening club.
Their gardening club welcomes anyone from the local community who wants to get involved, and specifically reaches out to those who may not have access to their own green space, or who are socially isolated. They involved their participants in choosing plants for the area, which really created a sense of ownership over and investment in the space. The improvements have been well-received, both by their group and by the wider public.
They undertook the planting during autumn and spring, over the course of several gardening club sessions and had up to 12 people take part in each session. The grant has made a difference to the park environment. Enhancing the planting within the park improves the space for all who use it and the Trust have had many positive comments from members of the public about the new planting. In addition, the planting was a popular activity with their group members, who had a clear sense of the 'before and after', and so felt a sense of achievement and pride in the area they had improved.
The Trust have a steady group of volunteers who have worked with them for many years, but they also continually do outreach work and so, several people who took part in the planting work were new to the club and had not done much gardening before at all. As such, they learned new skills, identifying plants, learning how to plant and how to care for the newly planted area.