Green Roots Fund: round one

Allens Community Garden aims to support the physical, mental and social health of the community through access to green infrastructure. The project will provide opportunities for outdoor activities that enhance the biodiversity of the garden. Biodiversity will be tracked by local resident citizen scientists with the help of the local community. Local groups will also be involved in waste reduction and learn sustainable practice and composting strategies.

Growing Green Circles will transform neglected and underused land across six London boroughs into living places where people and nature flourish together. The project will work with local communities to co-design the greening of school grounds, housing estates and community spaces while training residents in regenerative horticulture, tree planting and biodiversity. Delivery teams of paid trainees and volunteers will implement planting, habitat creation and monitoring. Green Champions appointed at each site will lead stewardship and share learning. Learning resources and stories will be shared through a microsite as well as social and traditional media.

Habitat loss and changing land use has resulted in a severe decline of Tower Mustard, now a Critically Endangered species in London. Tower Mustard was frequent in the city and this is a proactive recovery project to avoid the serious risk of it disappearing from the capital. Citizen Zoo will unite local authorities, NGOs, site managers and residents to reintroduce the species to carefully selected sites. Seeds have already been collected, including from Kew Gardens’ Millennium Seed Bank, and the project will be a rare opportunity for communities to help bring a species back from the brink.

Crane Valley Trail will deliver a continuously accessible riverside path across five boroughs for walking, cycling and wheeling. The site will be five times the size of Hyde Park. Currently 94% of people who live within a mile of the Crane River don’t know it’s there or don’t go there. This project will remove barriers to access and reach out to, and work with, underrepresented communities to develop their confidence to discover and treasure beautiful natural spaces full of wildlife along the Crane Valley.

Curious by Nature London will partner with the local primary school, home educating groups and Beckton community groups to deliver outdoor learning and nature connection activities in Beckton Woods for local families. Together they will focus on nature restoration and woodland management activities, such as clearing invasive species, building habitats for insects and slow worm, clearing litter and maintaining access paths. This project will provide children, especially those from diverse ethnic minority groups, who lack access to nature, to meaningfully engage with their natural environment while improving the woods.

Jessop Primary School, set within a nature-poor environment and high levels of social deprivation, has launched the UK’s first Dads Kids Club. As part of the Club, dads and male carers will lead the co-creation, construction, and maintenance of growing planters for every class and run an ecological audit, implementing new nature friendly systems throughout. Adults and students of all identities, beliefs and backgrounds will work together to grow food, as well as create new green infrastructure, introducing young people to the power of nature and climate resilience. It will mobilise more male parents to be more involved in their kids' learning and create lifelong memories of building and growing food with their children.

This project will create therapeutic green spaces at a secure mental health unit. The rationale is underpinned by research which identifies that treatment in green spaces can greatly improve recovery and that mental health hospital discharge success is higher when delivering therapy that uses green spaces. The therapeutic green spaces will be available to clinicians, visiting family and friends and the local Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS). The latter will use the spaces for horticulture training and community gardening, which will support mental health outside of a clinical setting. In addition, greening these spaces will provide an opportunity to introduce new plant species and foster biodiversity.

Set in the middle of a 4.2km green corridor, this project will deliver a wildflower meadow and increase insect numbers while protecting existing rare insects. Dense bramble will be removed and the area will be seeded with woodland flowers crucial for pollinators. Training will be provided to the community and educational experiences for local school children. The project will address that the local school has no green space and many of its children do not have access to a garden.

Blythe Hill Fields has a new children’s trim trail but sits on heavy London clay, so the park is typically very dry in summer and waterlogged in winter. This project will create a shallow swale that will also serve as a sustainable drainage system, making the trim trail more playable for more of the year. It will add new naturalistic play features such as mounds, rocks and log bridges and provide better land drainage for a newly-planted orchard. Local schools, residents and Friends volunteers will support with design, planting and upkeep, while the project will boost biodiversity in the park and open up new learning opportunities.

Fishpond Wood can be traced back to medieval times as a bluebell wood. Currently, however, the wood is largely inaccessible for many months of the year and Londoners and other visitors cannot enjoy their local greenspace. This project will create a new pathway to give year-round access, while also enabling the locally-rare English bluebells to recover their former glory. Friends of Fishpond Wood will provide a focus for local community engagement and opportunities for people of all backgrounds and groups to get involved in learning about the wood, helping to protect it and participate directly in management and decision-making.

Hammersmith & Fulham’s School Greening Audit revealed that many of the borough’s students had limited or no exposure to nature. Using evidence that small interventions can have big impacts, schools will be offered microgrants to make bespoke greening or enabling approaches, with guidance and advice from the Council. Interventions could include tree planting, new planters, new equipment and funding for local garden educators. Students and their families will develop a sense of stewardship for their natural environment, along with receiving nature-based learning through being given access to resources they currently lack.

A dedicated biodiversity area will be created at Tulse Hill Adventure Playground, offering children, young people and families direct access to nature, complementing the recently-replaced natural play structures. An underused, overgrown area will be transformed into a vibrant green sensory space featuring a wildflower meadow, pond and wetland habitat, wildlife houses, and newly planted native trees and plants. This is an area in nature deficit, where many of the local community lives in overcrowded social housing with no private outdoor space. The Green Adventure project will help build environmental awareness, create safe habitats for wildlife, provide opportunities for nature-based learning, play, and wellbeing activities that improve mental and physical health for the whole community.

The ground of the Searchlight Community Centre’s Garden is uneven, making it a challenge for those less steady on their feet and to move wheelchairs or walking aids in this area. Disabled people use the centre daily, so this project will make the garden accessible to everyone who visits. The Society will grow its volunteer pool to help with the outside green space supporting centre users with the growing projects they have requested.

Currently Lambeth has no watercourses accessible to the public for enjoyment. This project will bring 120m of lost historic boundary stream to the surface in Hilly Four Acres and Norwood Grove. The stream will be de-culverted and meandered, creating pools and cascades to provide more opportunities for wildlife. This will also slow water flow, There will be volunteer workdays and training days to install plants and create leaky dams, improving biodiversity.

Volunteers on the Brockwell Park Estate, Brixton, run and manage this eight-year, multi-stage project that will prevent flooding, by diverting 750,000 litres of annual rainwater run-off from the roofs of housing blocks into sustainable drainage systems (SuDS). The Green Roots programme will fund the second stage of the project to redirect rainwater from eight surface water downpipes into rain gardens, water butts and attenuation tanks. It will make one block independent of the sewerage system and improve the estate’s amenity. Community engagement will be increased through workshops and creating vegetable gardens and street planters.

This transformational project seeks to restore the Old Lea, as far as possible, to look and function as a cleaner and healthier waterway, that is also more resilient to climate change. Using participatory-led engagement to develop the design, the project will increase access to a safer, nature-rich environment for all, create opportunities for nature-focused education and training for Londoners of all ages, as well as hosting regular events. The project will also protect and enhance habitats, aiming to support species such as water shrews and kingfishers that have been sighted in the area.

This project will enhance habitats, improve river health and promote climate resilience. It focuses on three key locations – Wadham meadow/woodland, the banks of the Ching and Aldriche Way Estate – with smaller interventions creating stepping stones of ecological connectivity between Walthamstow marshes and Epping Forest, along with engagement activities on other nearby housing estates and allotments. These are areas with multiple socio-economic inequalities, including access to nature and greenspace and risk of surface water flooding and the project will support residents to discover and connect with nature and waterways, while also working towards a more connected, resilient community and collective approach for caring for the environment.

This initiative will strengthen the capacity of the London National Park City’s (LNPC) London-wide volunteer Ranger network to deliver inclusive, impactful nature connection and recovery work at the neighbourhood-scale. London’s communities will be enabled to safely and confidently take forward their ideas for nature recovery in their local area. LNPC will provide structured training in safeguarding, first aid, risk assessments and more as well as creating peer-learning guides and online courses on its online community platform.

Significant development and investment projects are anticipated in Rainham, which will unlock funding for blue and green infrastructure. However, the area currently requires a coherent vision that will ensure that investments are targeted where they are likely to achieve the greatest impact. This project will deliver evidence and tools to guide and support improvements in biodiversity, the public realm, walking/cycling routes and access to waterways. This will include habitat mapping and surveys of existing green and blue infrastructure, their accessibility and biodiversity value.

London Wildlife Trust will reintroduce the Eurasian beaver and white stork to Eastbrookend Country Park in Barking & Dagenham. The borough is home to some of London’s most deprived and diverse communities and the project includes an extensive outreach programme to connect local people with these iconic native species and offer opportunities to directly support their re-establishment. The project will contribute to embedding nature recovery into the identity of the borough.

Lancaster West identified key opportunities to improve access to green space in the area through support gained from the Mayor of London’s Green & Resilient Spaces fund. Building on this momentum, this project will enhance play areas, pedestrian routes and gateway areas across Lancaster West Estate and Notting Dale. Residents have actively contributed to the designs for calming, flood-resilient and climate-adapted green spaces for walking, gathering and reflection, while new youth spaces will be created on the Lancaster West Estate. The project will integrate nature into everyday movement, support wildlife and improve air quality by creating biodiverse corridors across three housing estates.

Residents will co-design nature-based solutions for biodiversity and water resilience at Roupell Park Estate, building on existing momentum from past greening success. Together they will build a vision to create habitats and capture rainwater, as well as delivering gardening workshops. Projects include planting fruit trees, installing green roofs on bike sheds and a community-led plan for rain gardens and other sustainable drainage systems (SuDS). The project will expand access to underrepresented communities and is rooted in community ownership. A key aim is to empower residents to shape their environment while building resilience.

Local communities will be at the heart of this project to restore 3.4km of the Salmons Brook through Enfield Chase, returning the river to its natural, pre-human state. Creating wetlands and wet woodlands, the project will transform council-owned farmland and protect 2,000 properties from flooding. Thames21 will engage with the community, and turn the Salmons Brook into a shared space for nature and wellbeing while delivering lasting environmental and social impact. The project has been described by the Environment Agency as "the single most important piece of river restoration work [needed] in London".

A youth panel of 16 to 18 year-olds will assess and award micro grants of up to £1,000 to London-based, youth-led nature projects. The projects will typically be part of schools, community groups or charities and will provide training, promotion and networking for environmental initiatives, along with enhancing neighbourhoods. The project aims for a long-lasting and transformational impact through providing a platform to convene and empower young people from different backgrounds and enabling them to act as environmental stewards in their own communities.

Local residents will co-design community orchards for people and nature in fourteen sites across eight London boroughs. The project will remove barriers to participation in greening, working with communities that are majority Black and People of Colour (BPOC) and living in high-density estates. Meanwhile, the project also addresses historic losses in access to orchards and offers opportunities for improved wellbeing, as well as creating pathways into employment.

Sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) are a nature-based solution to address flooding from sewer overflows, pollution and can even address groundwater contamination. The St John’s Society were guided by SuDS principles to successfully pilot raingardens that were led and maintained by the community. This project will replicate their success in further areas at risk of flooding, to protect residents and increase liveability and wellbeing. They will build on their experience and continue to scale up, engage with residents and educate communities to build long-term climate resilience.