Mayor of London’s Green Roots Fund – Press Release Announcement
We’re proud to announce that we’ve been awarded grant funding from the Mayor of London’s Green Roots Fund Round 2 to restore the Lee and District Land Club Baring Road allotments in Grove Park after many years of decline.
The Allotment Restoration Project is a collaboration between Wild Rangers, Lewisham Council, and the newly elected committee of the Lee and District Land Club Cooperative Society (LDLCCS), which helps oversee management of the site.
With support from the @MayorofLondon Green Roots Fund, this one-hectare site will be restored into a thriving food-growing space once again, ensuring it can be used and enjoyed by future generations.
The funding will also support the creation of a new welcoming entrance to better mark and celebrate this historic allotment site — established in 1913 — as an important community asset and destination within Grove Park’s evolving landscape history.
Reviving the Baring Road Allotment
Work is underway to restore this derelict allotment site, bringing it back into productive use to create growing spaces and a new community wellbeing garden to support wellbeing initiatives. First established in 1913 as the Lee and District Land Club Cooperative, this historic site once played an important role in the ‘Dig for Victory’ movement. Now, we’re bringing it back to support today’s ‘Right to Grow’.
This next chapter begins with a big clearout – cutting back brambles, digging out invasive roots and skipping years of accumulated rubbish.
We are working collaboratively with the newly elected Lee and District Land Club Committee and the Council to revive the site over the coming months of 2026.
Last year we coordinated five volunteer days, who helped clear 6 skips of rubbish. Read about our work so far, and the plans to bring it back to life, into a thriving, productive community asset once more. Thank you to allotment tenants who helped with ideas for the allotment.
We look forward to sharing more as our ideas develop for the ‘Wonderful Healing Garden’ at the proposed community wellbeing plots. Inspired by E. Nesbit’s story The Wonderful Garden, which captures the magic and secret language of flowers through a child’s sense of curiosity, we hope this space will nurture a similar sense of wonder.
Our aim is to create a place where the simple act of growing healthy food keeps that “magic” alive—deepening connections to the heritage of the neighbourhood and to the enduring traditions of growing your own nutritious healing herbs and vegetables.
Growing For Peace
Lewisham celebrated Borough of Culture 2022, and thanks to funding from LBL, we held a series of workshops with local schools and the community around the theme ‘Growing for Peace’.
Alongside local author Emily Haworth-Booth, we delivered a number of graphic novel workshops with local schools and the local community, exploring the themes of ‘protest’ and ‘peace’ to illustrate a story about the future we want to create. An exhibition of everyone’s art work was up at the Ringway during December 2022.
Together with Clay at the Ringway project and local artist Lily German, we explored the theme of climate change through art, reading about the Sand Fairy in Edith Nesbit’s story ‘Five Children and It’, and making ceramic sand fairies.
We produced ‘The Wild Rangers’ Guide to Making a Healthy Neighbourhood‘, illustrated by Emily Haworth-Booth, exploring the story of Grove Park’s 50 year campaign to protect its green spaces and community assets.
Astronomy Night
The Ringway Centre and the Woodland behind is designated as a Dark Sky Discovery Site, making it a great place to explore the stars and planets at night. We were joined by from the Royal Observatory for a facinating talk about the moon and planets. Later we went out to explore the planets with telescopes. Unfortunately it was a cloudy day, but we did manage to take a shot of the moon as the clouds cleared a little.
