Tucked away behind the hedges is the Myatt’s Fields Park community greenhouse, a buzzing space full of activity! We use it to grow seedlings for community groups in the local area, as well as running horticulture training sessions, cooking groups and growing plants with our gardening group for use in the park.
Our greenhouse is the heartbeat of our community food initiatives. By blending horticulture with social action, we provide a vital resource for the park and its people. Our work focuses on:
Hyper-Local Food Security: We grow fresh produce specifically for community meals hosted at the Park Depot, ensuring that "farm-to-table" is a reality for our neighbors.
Integrated Horticulture: We blur the lines between aesthetics and utility by mixing ornamental park plants with edible varieties, proving that public spaces can be both beautiful and bountiful.
Skill Building: We offer informal, hands-on training in food cultivation and park maintenance, empowering residents with lifelong green skills.
Therapeutic Space: The greenhouse serves as an indoor sanctuary, offering volunteers a calm, nature-filled environment to improve their mental well-being and find their own pace.
Following five years of generous support from the City Bridge Foundation (2019–2024), Myatt's Fields Park Project is at a pivotal transitional crossroads. While actively seeking new long-term partners, our commitment to the community remains unshaken: we are currently self-funding the distribution of food seedlings to 25 local groups, including housing estates, neighborhood growers, schools, youth centers, and community hubs.
We are thrilled to share that we have secured 10 months of funding from Awards for All (September to June 2026) to sustain our food seedling initiative. Alongside our core food-growing activities, we are expanding the program to include native wildflowers, aiming to boost local biodiversity and rewild urban green spaces alongside food production.
However, our vision goes further. We are seeking multi-year funding to expand our seedling distributions to at least 50 local projects over the next 5 years, complete with tailored hands-on training.
Without our seedling support, many of these grassroots projects would simply cease to exist. We are seeking financial partners to keep this "green engine" running for the thousands of residents who rely on it, driving long-term, systemic change for local food access and security.
Our historic greenhouse is a rare survivor from the era when park depots grew all their own bedding plants on-site. While most park greenhouses across the country were demolished in favor of commercial suppliers, ours complete with its cold frames happily escaped that fate.
In 2000, the Myatt’s Fields Park Project assumed management of the greenhouse with a clear vision: to empower local, diverse communities through food growing. Since then, the greenhouse has served as a thriving hub, raising thousands of young food plants every year to supply neighborhood growers, housing estates, schools, and community centers.
Community food growing does far more than yield fresh produce, it plays a vital role in building local food security and building resilience against climate change. By empowering residents to grow their own chemical-free food locally, we reduce food miles, improve access to fresh, affordable nutrition in urban areas, and foster biodiversity through sustainable urban agriculture.
In early 2025, our award-winning initiative was featured on BBC Two’s Monty Don’s British Gardens (Episode 4), link here. Looking ahead to 2026, our main depot buildings are undergoing a major refurbishment to create significantly improved, modern community facilities. While these construction works may temporarily restrict volunteer access to the greenhouse itself, our core mission continues uninterrupted: we will remain hard at work growing and distributing food crops to our local network throughout the refurbishment.
Supported by the City Bridge Foundation, our project has transformed the local food landscape across the Vassall, Myatt's Fields (formerly Coldharbour), and Camberwell Green wards. We don't just grow in the park; we seed resilience across the entire neighborhood.
When the world stopped, our greenhouse didn't. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, we supplied 300 households with food plants to grow at home.
"The feedback was unanimous: these plants weren't just food; they were a vital tool for mental health, providing a sense of purpose and improving diets during a period of intense isolation."
The map shows our food growing participants: Housing estates, schools, preschools, nurseries, community centres, children centres, individual households and parks.
Our gardeners offered food growing workshops, giving expert and detailed advice on all things edible.We allocated these sessions to our local community groups, helping those people most in need.
We offered local people the chance to come into the greenhouse for up to 12 sessions to grow foods from all over the world with us.Wherever possible we grow the food crops familiar to our participants, who include people from many and varied cultures around the world.
Local people make it all happen! We ran food growing and greenhouse volunteering on Thrusdays and Sundays between 9am and noon.
Wedndesdays and Fridays 9:30am to 12pm- Park volunteering
Sundays 10am to 1pm- Food growing volunteering
Contact our Park Manager on parkmanager@myattsfieldspark.info to attend our friendly, informal drop-in sessions, or visit this page for more details.
If you would like to learn more about food crop growing, tune into these short video clips on how to grow food like tomatoes, onions, chard and more. What can you grow in spring and other seasons? Our expert gardener, Fabrice, has the answers. Please don’t forget to leave a Like!
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