After an emergency meeting to discuss matters, we at Transition Walthamstow have made some decisions regarding our community garden
We’re having to scale back our plans at the garden. This came to a head when it was discovered that homeless people were using the site to sleep, eat and light fires. This is, of course, incredibly sad, but we don’t have the skills, experience or resources to support the homeless. It’s also got legal implications and has caused problems with the people living in the flats behind.
The site isn’t secured. We did construct a pallet fence along the front, but both sides have only low walls which are easy to climb over. We don’t have the funds to install proper fencing and would prefer a natural one in the form of a hawthorn hedge.
However, we can’t be seen to be encouraging a homeless encampment. The site doesn’t belong to us and the council could easily remove our access, tarmacing over it to make another car park.
A roofed water catchment structure with gravel floor and seating would obviously make a very appealing place to sleep for anyone who’s homeless. So that’s now off the table, at least until such a time that we can make the site secure.
We’ve also been storing a lot of stuff at the garden, including wood and tarpaulins. Stuff that people can burn or sleep under to stay warm and dry. That all had to be moved off site. And a few of us gave up their Saturday recently to do just that.
We still need some sort of water catchment, though, so the plan is to scale things back considerably. Instead we’re going to build a much simpler structure that sits over the top of two or three water cubes – depending on how far we can stretch our budget.
We’re also postponing plans to create paths throughout the site, get more planters and dig flower and vegetable beds. We’re going to plant fruit trees and bushes and some wildflowers so it’s clear the garden is being worked on, and then leave everything to rewild a bit. We can revisit other plans further down the line.
A fenced and locked site will keep it secure. But that requires volunteers to be there to open it up and look after it so that the community can actually use it. We simply don’t have the numbers to do that yet. We need a lot more buy-in from the local community and a lot more hands on deck. We’ve struggled to get people interested and that’s not going to get any easier as we go into winter.
Our plans have had to change accordingly and we’ll be doing less, but hopefully doing it better. Until we can get more funding and more volunteers.
It’s sad that we’re having to think about things like fencing the site off. That we’ve had to move all the wood and so on that we’d collected so that we can’t be accused of encouraging a homeless encampment.
It’s not right that in this country, in 2024, there aren’t enough resources to properly support these people.
Maybe if successive governments put as much effort into taxing the wealthy and large corporations as they do into starving poor children and letting pensioners freeze to death we wouldn’t be in the position.
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