Thamesmead Social Gardens Learning & Impact Handbook
I am really pleased to share the Thamesmead Social Gardens Learning & Impact Handbook, which documents 2 years of conversations, decision making and insights developed alongside communities in Greenwich & Bexley.
The project explored ways to sustain engagement with nature and outdoor spaces through community gardening. At its heart was a simple commitment: to lead with participation. By this we meant that every decision, shift and development within the programme would be informed by what communities were telling us would meaningfully enable their inclusion.
I am particularly proud of how we upheld this commitment because it involved doing virtually everything differently to the ways they had been done before we started. This process of ‘undoing’ seemed to require almost constant exertion during the first year and sometimes felt like an uncomfortably steep learning curve. However, things did stabilize and the effort was worthwhile; we recorded a 13x increase in repeat engagement with the gardens through the project!
The handbook elaborates on these key metrics, outlines our participatory approach and shares key programming decisions and practical recommendations. Most importantly, it focuses on the knowledge we produced with communities that explores what motivated people to take part, the barriers they encountered, and the conditions that would support their ongoing involvement.
Having had some time to reflect, the project now feels broadly like a demonstration of what has to be moved out of the way for participation to be genuinely prioritised and what is possible when this happens.
I hope that anyone with an interest in programming, place, participation, public spaces, access to nature or gardening could find something of interest here. Although the handbook does not shy away from detail or complexity, it has been designed so you can dip in and out of the sections most relevant to you. I hope you like it!
Finally, I have a huge debt of gratitude to the communities in Abbeywood & Thamesmead who showed great trust in me and got involved with absolute generosity and open-mindedness.
The Social Gardens handbook is free to download here.