Bemerton Corner
We planted a meadow in a council estate. In three days.
A chance encounter in the comments on an Instagram post led to neighbours planting a wild meadow on the edge of a block of flats. Now neighbours, around Bemerton Estate, are asking for more donations of turf to finish the last tenth of the green.
Neighbours living on the corner where Copenhagen Street and Caledonian Road meet in Islington, including U Offset Co-Founder Geoffrey Idun, had got together to apply for a grant to brighten up the space.
Islington Council gave the We Are Cally grants to people who wanted to make their neighbourhood greener. The neighbours, who call their group Bemerton Corner, had a rough plan to get a planter to sit outside Lewis Carroll Children’s Library. But they soon found out that the planters they really liked were beyond their £500 grant.
So they started looking for inspiration on landscape gardeners’ and architects’ Instagram accounts. They found out that an exhibition about reconnecting spaces with nature was going to be coming to King’s Cross, just five minutes down the road. They planned to go to the exhibition together to get some inspiration.
One of the Bemerton Corner members left a message below a photo posted on Planted Cities’ Instagram account saying: “We want to brighten up our grim corner of public space so we got together to ask the council for help and they gave us £500 to make the space greener. We then realised that the amazing planters dotted across King’s Cross are out of our price range so we are coming to the exhibition to get inspiration”.
The Planted Cities organiser Deborah Spencer replied almost straight away with an offer of wild meadow turf. The 68 square metres of Botanical Skyline turf made by the company Pictorial Meadows was hanging as a backdrop to the Planted Cities’ filmed talks. But there was a catch – the residents would have to accept the turf in six days’ time.
The neighbours live in flats and at that point had no permission to use the land, no equipment, very little gardening experience and not nearly enough man power.
The first challenge was to work out who owned the land and who to ask for permission. After some digging, they established the council owned the green, as part of the Bemerton South Housing Estate and it took four days to get the go ahead. They then needed to get spades and forks. Anna Carrdus, who tends to an orchard she planted in Edward Square across the road from the green, was known in the area as she would regularly go past the flats with a buggy full of gardening tools. She lent the equipment the Friends of Edward Square use – a few forks and spades.
Volunteers started digging up the grass on Saturday morning. But digging up weeds and turning the soil for 100 square metres was going to be a huge job. They needed more people. That’s when something amazing happened. People who live in the flats nearby spontaneously started helping. One neighbour dropped her shopping and got on her knees to furiously pull out the grass with her hands. It was clear they needed more equipment.
The Bemerton Estate is off the Caledonian Road in Islington and if you cross the road you go into Barnsbury with tree-lined avenues. The parks have organised groups of volunteers. The gardeners at Thornhill Square Gardens opened up their equipment store for the weekend.
Then the volunteers at Thornhill Road Gardens cancelled their gardening plans in their own park on Sunday morning and marched down with forks and spades to Bemerton Corner. In all, more than 30 neighbours cancelled their weekend plans to prepare the land.
A group of neighbours headed to Granary Square in King’s Cross on Sunday night to strip the turf off the TV set. The council grant paid part of the cost of the vans, while Planted Cities picked up the rest of the bill. The turf arrived in Bemerton Corner on Monday morning and volunteers laid it out.
Clare,
Bemerton Corner resident
bemertoncorner@gmail.com
Instagram: @bemertoncorner
Photography: Monica Wells