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.
Southeastern Customer and Community Improvement Fund
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!
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.
