Skip to main content
Mayor of London logo London Assembly logo
Home

The food that we grow, cook and eat together is a fundamental part of our culture.

Mountford Growing Community’s Stories with Roots brings together a community in Hackney through shared experiences around food and heritage.

Begun as a grassroots gardening project, this wonderful enterprise is flourishing following funding from the Mayor of London’s Untold Stories programme.  

Mountford Growing Community is a small resident-led community organisation in Hackney which is strengthening community cohesion and health, encouraging civic participation to bring people together and reduce social isolation.

Residents of the estate enjoy a strong sense of shared identity and can grow friendships which bring them closer together.

Nurturing the natural environment also deepens ties with the local area and connects the community with the community of makers in London’s east end, strengthening the community’s resilience, mutual care and support system.  

Plants link us to the natural environment around us, to culture and food, to stories of our heritage and our past – whether here in the UK or elsewhere in the world...
Mountford Growing Community

Gardening club 

The estate’s gardening club means residents and children can plant and harvest food that is particular to their own cultural traditions, items that might otherwise be hard to buy. Edible flowers, fruit trees, nut trees, herbs and vegetables are among the interesting things grown.

Community cookbook

A community cookbook has been printed with recipes that reflect the diverse culinary cultures of the neighbourhood, many recipes handed down through several generations, bringing together traditions from as far afield as Saint Lucia, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Taiwan, as well as from Europe. At the heart of the project is a programme of community meals where residents share their cultural and culinary identities. 


New art installations

To celebrate this project and represent the local community, five new art installations have been installed across the estate.

The artworks feature tiled panels co-designed with residents, local ceramicists and designers. Residents helped to design, prototype, craft and construct the tiles through a series of workshops.

Now the richness of the estate’s horticultural and culinary traditions can be seen by all in these vibrant new displays in the public realm.   

In a largely diasporic, underrepresented community impacted by migration, Stories with Roots promotes community participation, cohesion and pride through shared spaces and lived experience.  


Untold Stories: uncovering fascinating stories of diverse Londoners across the city

Read more case studies

Need a document on this page in an accessible format?

If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need a version of a PDF or other document on this page in a more accessible format, please get in touch via our online form and tell us which format you need.

It will also help us if you tell us which assistive technology you use. We’ll consider your request and get back to you in 5 working days.