We use our greenhouse to support community food growing projects, including:

• Growing food in and around the greenhouse for community meals in the park;
• 300 households around Myatt's Fields Park were supplied with food plants to grow at home during lockdown. Their collective feedback was that it helped them tremendously with their mental health, improved their diet and overall health.
• Supporting food growing in the wider community – on estates, in schools, by roadsides and much more. In 2023 we supported 45 local groups with 40,000 baby plants yearly, reaching over 3000 individuals.

Who do we support? Community groups or community-minded individuals growing food for the community in Vassall, Coldharbour (now known as Myatt's Fields) and Camberwell Green wards (i.e. about a mile around the park).‍

Who supports us? We were able to provide these much needed services between 2019 and 2024,  thanks to the support from City Bridge, the funding arm of The City of London Corporation's charity.

History

Our beautiful greenhouse is a rare survivor from the years when parks would grow all their annual and perennial bedding plants on site. Most park greenhouses were demolished when it became more cost-effective to buy in bedding from suppliers, but our greenhouse together with its cold frames and cucumber house escaped this fate.

In 2000, Myatt’s Fields Park Project took over the running of the park with a vision to support food growing by our many local vulnerable communities. The greenhouse provided a wonderful opportunity to grow young food plants, and we have used it intensively for over 16 years to support our local community groups growing food crops in their community gardens.

In early 2025, Monty Don featured our award-winning food growing project on his BBC 2 programme ‘Monty Don’s British Gardens’, episode 4, link here. In 2025, our main depot buildings are being refurbished to provide hugely improved community facilities.

The building works may prevent volunteer access to the greenhouse during refurbishment, but we will still be growing food crops for local groups. If you would like to join the food growing volunteering , please email us at enquiries@myattsfieldspark.info with your name and contact details so we can get back to you before reopening this volunteering opportunity- thank you.

​Free baby plants, pots and soil

• We offered food crop plug plants to our community partners three times yearly in February May and October. These gave our local community food growers a flying start, setting them up for the seasons ahead.
  

• Our expert gardeners also offered free packs of plants to any other local people who were growing for community use​.

• We distributed between 3000 to 8000 seedlings yearly between 2019 and 2024.

• The map shows our food growing participants: Housing estates, schools, preschools, nurseries, community centres, children centres, individual households and parks.

Expert advice for growing groups

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.

Greenhouse growing sessions

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.​

Volunteering

Local people make it all happen! Before 2025, we ran food growing and greenhouse volunteering on Wednesdays and Sundays between 9am and noon. While this offer is currently unavailable due to the depot refurbishment works, you can still join the park gardening volunteering on Wednesdays and Fridays 9.30am to 1pm.

‍Contact our Horticultural Manager on horticulture@myattsfieldspark.info to attend these friendly, informal drop-in sessions, or visit this page for more details.

Learn about food growing

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!Huge thanks to City Bridge Trust for their support over the last 5 years. We are now seeking further financial support to allow us to carry on growing food for our community.