Southeastern Customer and Community Improvement Fund – Press Release Announcement

We’re delighted to announce that we’ve been awarded grant funding from Southeastern’s Customer and Community Improvement Fund to create Grove Park’s first community wellbeing & growing skills gardening hub at the site of the Lee and District Land Club Baring Road Allotments.

This exciting project will enable us to grow plants to help make Grove Park Station flower beds beautiful and biodiverse to benefit both passengers and wildlife! Long-term the gardening hub will support sharing growing skills, learning about healthy food growing, and supporting wellbeing initiatives. 

The project represents a spatially small, but significant footprint of the wider project to Restore the Baring Road Allotment Site, after many years of decline. We have been working closely with the Lee and District Land Club Committee over the last year to help restore this site and bring it back into productive use.

Funding from Southeastern’s Customer and Community Improvement Fund is supporting the clearance and preparation of the two plots to create two focus areas: The “Wellbeing Garden”, a tranquil space to sit and garden; as well as a growing garden – bringing  “The Wonderful Healing Garden” project to life. This will support a welcoming and practical gardening space to support a gardening club, educational sessions for local schools, and other community-focused initiatives – providing opportunities to  learn, grow and connect. The funding will help us deliver a covered indoor area, a potting shed, seating, tools, a hot composter, and water butts —  all designed to support sustainable and ecological gardening practices.

We are honoured to be one of 14 other amazing projects which have been selected to receive support through Southeastern’s Customer and Community Improvement Fund. We are tremendously grateful to Southeastern for investing in helping to bring this community asset to life!