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 Trust (2019–2024), we are now at a transitional crossroads. While we are actively seeking new long-term partners, our commitment to the community remains unshaken. We are currently self-funding the distribution of food seedlings to 30 local groups, including: Housing estates and neighborhood growers, schools and youth centers as well as community hubs.
Without our seedling support, many of these grassroots projects would simply cease to exist. We are seeking financial support to ensure this "green engine" keeps running for the hundreds of people who rely on it and expand it to create a systemic change on food acccess.
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 2026, 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 greenhouse@myattsfieldspark.info with your name and contact details so we can guide you thorugh the application process and how to take part in the different volunteer opportunities.
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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