Harper-Thames on the small plot of green that refuses to give up its lease
Wedged between two considerably taller, considerably newer developments sits a community garden that has, according to the volunteers who tend it, survived three separate attempts over the years to convert the plot into something more commercially productive, purely through a combination of stubborn organising, favourable lease terms secured years ago, and what one volunteer describes, only half joking, as “sheer bloody mindedness.”
I spent an afternoon there, mostly getting gently but firmly instructed on the correct way to weed a raised bed, and left with a genuinely deeper understanding of how much deliberate, ongoing effort keeps a small green space alive in an area where the commercial value of that same land has grown considerably.
How It Got Here
The garden’s origins trace back several decades, to a period when the surrounding land was considerably less commercially desirable and a group of local residents secured a long term lease on what was then, by most accounts, an unremarkable patch of neglected ground, converting it gradually into the working community garden that exists today.
“None of the original people who started this could have predicted what the land around us would become,” a longtime volunteer told me, gesturing at the glass fronted development looming on one side. “The lease terms they negotiated back then are honestly the single biggest reason we still exist. Nobody could get anything close to those terms today.”
The Development Pressure
Volunteers describe several distinct periods over the years when developers or landowners expressed interest in acquiring or redeveloping the site, pressure that the garden’s governing community group has consistently resisted, citing both the terms of their existing lease and sustained organised local support for keeping the space as green, publicly accessible community land.
“There’s always been someone interested in what this land could become instead,” another volunteer said. “A building, obviously, given everything around us. We’ve had to be genuinely organised and genuinely persistent every single time that interest has resurfaced, because I don’t think anyone assumes we’ll simply keep existing by default anymore.”
What The Garden Actually Provides
Beyond the produce grown in its raised beds, which volunteers distribute informally among the group and, on occasion, donate to a nearby community kitchen, the garden functions as a genuine, if modest, gathering point for a specific cross section of local residents who describe few other comparable spaces available to them in the immediate area.
“This is genuinely the only outdoor space near me where I can just sit, actually sit, without needing to buy something to justify being there,” one regular visitor told me. “Everywhere else nearby is either a private development’s forecourt or a cafe. This is just, genuinely, a place to be.”
The Land Value Question
Urban land use researchers note that community gardens occupying prime, high value urban land represent a genuinely difficult ongoing negotiation between the land’s theoretical maximum commercial value and its actual, harder to quantify community and environmental value, a tension that has driven the loss of numerous similar spaces across London over recent decades even where local community attachment to the space was genuinely strong.
“The commercial case against a community garden on genuinely valuable urban land is almost always financially overwhelming if you’re purely measuring commercial development potential against what the garden itself generates,” said one urban land use researcher. “What keeps spaces like this surviving is almost always some combination of favourable legal protection, like a strong lease or a community land trust arrangement, and sustained organised local advocacy that makes any attempt to redevelop the site politically costly for whoever attempts it.”
The Volunteers Keeping It Going
The garden’s day to day survival depends heavily on a relatively small, dedicated group of regular volunteers, several of whom described the physical maintenance work as almost secondary to the ongoing, less visible work of maintaining the lease, engaging with local planning consultations, and generally staying organised enough to respond quickly whenever development pressure resurfaces.
“Half of keeping this place alive isn’t gardening at all,” one volunteer said. “It’s turning up to council meetings, it’s writing letters, it’s making sure the people who could take this land away from us know there’s a genuinely organised community behind it that will fight for it every single time. The actual weeding is almost the easy part.”
What Happens If It Ever Loses
Volunteers were candid that the garden’s continued existence, while currently secure under its present lease terms, is not guaranteed indefinitely, and several described real concern about what happens when the current lease eventually comes up for renewal, given how dramatically the surrounding land’s commercial value has increased since the original terms were negotiated.
“We try not to think about it too much day to day,” one volunteer admitted. “But yes, genuinely, we know that lease renewal conversation is coming eventually, and we know the landscape we’ll be negotiating in looks nothing like what it looked like when this garden started. We’re already trying to build the case, the community support, the documented value this space provides, that we’ll need for that conversation.”
What This Small Plot Represents
Beyond its immediate, practical function as a growing space and gathering point, the garden has become, for many locals I spoke with, a genuinely meaningful symbol of what deliberate, organised community effort can preserve even against considerable commercial pressure, a small, stubborn patch of green refusing, for now, to become one more glass fronted development among the many already surrounding it.
Further Reading
More of my reporting on Shoreditch community spaces can be found at my author page at The London Prat, with additional coverage at Bohiney Magazine. Related material is collected at NewsThump.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
