Elthered Housing Estate

26 Feb Elthered Housing Estate

From meeting with some of the Ethelred Estate residents, residents board and local supporters, it has been made very apparent that Ethelred Estate is forever changing towards a better environment for its residents and more. One other important issue is that parts of

Lambeth seems to be being redeveloped with a top-down approach, without enough involvement of the wider community of. More could be done to show the local authorities and businesses that there is serious talent in these areas and wider.There is a need to be taken more seriously in line with the future of this immediate area and wide Ethelred Estate has a community garden space, that has been used by the residents for the growing of fruit and vegetables, however, it was, when we were asked to look at maintenance and community involvement, overgrown and needed some attention. The plan

There is a need to be taken more seriously in line with the future of this immediate area and wide Ethelred Estate has a community garden space, that has been used by the residents for the growing of fruit and vegetables, however, it was, when we were asked to look at maintenance and community involvement, overgrown and needed some attention. The plan was to make the project be sustainable by the community eventually and for the space to be used more community wise. We were been approached to create a project in which more of the participants of the estate could grow food and decorative plants on the existing space.

To this day, we have now nine members and their families coming informally to garden for themselves or to just help out making the area maintained to a better standard. The reasoning behind them being involved is to learn how to grow fruit and vegetables and come out and meet people. This we see as a few of many reasons to call this activity an all round well-being tool. An example of community is that we have one member that only comes to water the plants once or twice a week for two hours at a time in the evening, just to ensure that all that we do doesn’t die when are not there. Our work has also been taken notice of by the local GP surgeries and since we have started in the estate they have asked us to design and implement growing spaces in the Lambeth Walk GP surgery through a borough-wide food growing COOP, that is tied in with the Guys and St. Thomas’s Trust.

We were able to design and build the planters outside the garages that we were kindly allowed to use for storage. Since we have implemented this and subsequent other gardens within Lambeth-wide surgeries we have won a national award for our work, which we would aim to accomplish for the estate also.