On a bright early March morning that tells you spring is finally coming I was lucky enough to visit the Sydenham Garden in South London with its co-director Lowell Black.
Constituted as a charity in the London Borough of Lewisham, Sydenham Garden is a community resource whose green space creates opportunity for people to have better mental health. Each year, around 370 people spend 12 months on placements as co-workers at the garden’s two sites. It’s a deliberate choice: one year, one rotation around the Sun, all the seasons; time spent in close contact with nature, growing and cooking food, creating art and building friendships.
The day I visited had bright sunshine; one of the first such days this year. Frogspawn had appeared in the pond that morning. A group of jays made themselves busy in the trees. Flowers that had recently appeared across the garden added vibrant and fresh shades of yellow, white and blue to the greens and browns of winter.
Lowell described how the Garden began and how it functions now. Set up by a local GP and expanded over the years, its team of 15 staff and many more volunteers co-create a wide range of activities with groups of people, often in collaboration with other local charities. Access to participation comes from the borough’s Wellbeing Hub or as a social prescription through general practice. Many of the people who join have both mental and physical health needs that are often labelled by health services as ‘complex’.
Research provides compelling evidence of the value for our mental health of being in contact with nature, of being physically active, of engaging in creative activities, and of being connected with others. Sydenham Garden enables all of these at once.
For the Garden’s co-workers, it’s a space that is reparative, restorative and empowering. It’s a form of antidote to loneliness, isolation and exclusion.
It’s also fuelled by a commitment to social justice and equity. When the Government last year announced plans to reduce access to disability benefits, participants at the Garden spoke about what the loss of PIP (Personal Independence Payment) would mean to them, and through these conversations they contributed their views to the consultation.
Feeling the warmth of the sunshine is still a rarity at the beginning of March. The warmth of the welcome and the relationships between the people at Sydenham Garden is more of a perennial. There is a palpable sense of community and reciprocity – people learning together and sharing ideas, food and work, regardless of their roles and reasons for being there.
Sustaining Sydenham Garden is not easy. It needs money and long term commitment from funders and commissioners. Like many such initiatives and organisations nationwide, it’s under pressure to show it gives value for money. While the garden itself is governed by the rhythms of nature, it also has to work within the ever-changing world of NHS commissioning and the challenges of charitable funding.
Sustaining projects like Sydenham Garden long-term, when charitable funders constantly crave innovation, and statutory bodies cannot commit to them beyond a year or so at a time, is notoriously difficult. We’ve known for a long time that this isn’t working. Yet systems have changed very little over the years and charities and community organisations struggle to survive despite the value they bring to people’s lives.
Tree branches about to burst with the buds of blossom and leaves droop just a little from the artworks hanging from them, twirling in the gentle breeze, adding yet more colour and vibrancy. Sydenham Garden is a restorative space. An equitable space. A compassionate space. A brave space. Spaces like this are invaluable, but they are easily taken for granted and lost.
