The SLBI has now completed its ‘Pavement Plants for People’ project carrying out community planting along Norwood Road (where the Institute is located, in Tulse Hill), Norwood High Street and on Norwood Works, Lambeth’s largest industrial estate. We were awarded £15,295 from the Mayor of London’s ‘Grow Back Greener Fund,’ in early 2021, to carry out the project in partnership with the local Station to Station Business Improvement District and Lambeth Council.
The aim of our ‘Pavement Plants for People’ project is to provide a greener, cleaner space that improves the physical/mental well-being of local residents, improves air quality, increases biodiversity, creates important wildlife habitats and helps combat climate change.
Sarah Webley, our Education & Outreach Officer, has been very busy over the last year getting plants together (including some from the SLBI garden) that are suitable for the pavement areas. She has led over 20 planting sessions with local school groups, residents, businesses and community groups. We’ve counted around 120 people participating!
We’ve planted fruit trees and wildlife friendly plants in the ‘Hoopla’ raised beds, a variety of different herbs in the wall outside the pharmacy, pollution tolerant plants in a new bed on the corner by the South Circular and a range of plants in other beds outside local businesses. We’ve also installed two Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SuDS – or ’rain gardens’) to reduce local flood risk, and planted up 12 brightly painted blue and orange oil drums. We’ve just completed the final stage of the project, planting up 10 ‘depaved’ areas of grey pavement with a range of wildlife-friendly, drought tolerant and pollution tolerant plants.
We are currently finalising signage for the new planting, which will include a QR scannable code linking to an educational information trail on the Communities page of our website. This will help people learn about the reasons behind the project and the importance of plants in our community.
We hope that if you are in our local area you will enjoy the new planting. The Business Improvement District will carry out ongoing maintenance but we hope that local communities will also play a role in looking after it. We also hope to run occasional group sessions.
We have enjoyed bringing different people together to carry out the planting and hope that those involved who were new to the SLBI will now come and discover everything else we have to offer.
If you would like to work with us on a community project, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!
