This page is about our St Martin’s community gardening project. If you’d like to know more about it, get involved or suggest new gardening activity, please email us on stmartinscommunitygarden@gmail.com – and you can visit our instagram here.
Community gardening brings huge benefits to St Martin’s residents:
- It improves communal spaces and biodiversity on our estate
- It gets people together, encourages friendships and builds community
- It helps residents to feel safer and enjoy spaces they have helped to improve
We have run a number of gardening projects within our community and with partner organisations. From the outset, this achieved great things.
How We Got Started
We worked with Incredible Edible Lambeth to get funding from the Grow Back Greener funding by the Mayor of London.
With this funding and the support of Metropolitan Thames Valley and Notting Hill Genesis Housing Associations and Pinnacle, we started gardening groups in Abbots Park and Challice Way.
Residents got together to join in with gardening activities and transform their green spaces with flower beds and vegetable gardens. A professional gardener taught us the secrets of good gardening and our green spaces started to thrive! We even planted a small orchard on Challice Way.
Here’s what the Challice Way garden looks like in Spring! (Video by Wahida)
Our Huggins Corner Project
The pandemic period gave us the opportunity to think about breathing new life into the area of wasteland between Christchurch Road and Roupell Road, and to initiate our amazing Huggins Corner project.
We got a grant of £2,575.00 from Near Neighbours, and we commissioned Social Landscapes to lead a series of workshops with a group of residents. Together we redesigned the abandoned area to make a garden for people to enjoy.
Residents renamed this area Huggins Corner, after Margaret and William Huggins, the astronomers best known for their pioneering work in astronomical spectroscopy. They lived just around the corner, at 90 Upper Tulse Hill.
Now, Huggins Corner is a beautiful green space on our estate, for everyone to enjoy – take a look at our Huggins Corner page here to find out more about it. It makes a big impact on local biodiversity, and has been recognised as a Lambeth Bee Road.
Our Community Composting Project
In 2023 we started a great community composting project in our community garden on Challice Way. It supports our gardening activities and helps to improve biodiversity on our estate. If you’d like to find out more about it and join in here’s how.
Community Gardening Projects 2025-2026
In 2025 we partnered with Incredible Edible Lambeth on a series of workshops themed around creating biodiverse environments on housing estates, focused on growing and gardening at home. And we even made some bug hotels on Huggins Corner!
In 2026 we worked with St Martin’s Shed at our local Community Centre, who made a wonderful bench for the Challice Way garden.
And we continue to develop our garden sites to help build community and friendship on our estate, and to make St Martin’s a greener space.
Bug Hotels on Huggins!
Come and Join Us!
St Martins TRA 