Growing Together Project

Clapton Park Estate - Hackney

Delivery June 2024 - June 2025

Project Community Garden Network & Hackney Buzzline

In January 2024, ecoACTIVE started working in collaboration with Hackney Council’s Community Gangs Team. They were overseeing a project to increase positive community engagement on Clapton Park Estate, Hackney, in order to help reduce serious gang crime. They asked ecoACTIVE to carry out some gardening activities on the estate, whilst engaging local residents in the process. 

In the past, this area was known as the Poppy Estate, due to the sensitive, wildlife friendly grounds maintenance carried out by Grass Roof Company. Since their contract ended in 2023 some of the communal green spaces they had previously managed had become overgrown and in need of interventions to allow better access for residents, and to reinstate them as valuable wildlife habitats.

In June 2024, Badur Foundation awarded ecoACTIVE a grant of £4,000. The grant was to be used towards restoring a number of green spaces on Clapton Park Estate – Gilpin Square, Millfields Road Community Growing Plots, and creating some new planters at the front of Pedro Club. The aim was to rejuvenate these spaces, making them better for local people and for wildlife. The community would be engaged throughout the project, with opportunities provided for adults and children to take part.

Delivered 60 sessions & events on Clapton Park Estate, engaging a total of 169 participants.

Outcomes and project goals

Hold sessions for the local community to engage in gardening activities at three sites on Clapton Park Estate.

During the project, our gardener provided a series of sessions for residents on the estate, including woodwork sessions to build planters and benches at Pedro Club followed by a planting day with members; a community planting session on Gilpin Square; and weeding and planting sessions at the Millfields Road Growing Plots. In addition to these three focal sites funded by Badur Foundation, we have also led gardening activities at a number of other sites, helping volunteers to rejuvenate these sites, enhance plant diversity and improve access. Sessions included bulb planting and tree care sessions at the ‘Pergola Garden’ on Millfields Road; mulching, weeding and seed sowing sessions at the ‘Jasmine Garden’ on Millfields Road; planting sessions at Daubeney Community Garden; rejuvenating gabion planters on Daubeney Road; creating habitats and planting in front of Clapton Park Children’s Centre; and a tree pruning event on Redwald Road.

Educate young people and adults on how to grow, cultivate and harvest food, and to understand

how to increase biodiversity with wildlife-friendly gardening

Over the course of the project, we have been engaging a range of audiences in our sessions, including local residents, Pedro Youth Club members, Clapton Park Children’s Centre, community groups (e.g. Clapton Green Gym), and corporate volunteer groups. Activities have been developed to help the community grow and harvest food, improve participants’ mental and physical health, create social spaces, teach/improve gardening skills, and help participants understand how to increase biodiversity. One such area is a patch of green space next to Clapton Park Children’s Center, where we have been creating habitat zones, wildflower areas and woodland zones underneath silver birches and planting shade-tolerant pollinator plants. We asked the staff and children from the center to come and help us plant the pollinator plants including lavender, salvia nemorosa, aquilegia and scabioses and they continue to help us water these plants. We discussed with them the importance of plants for bees and butterflies. The children loved looking for insects in the soil and playing in the earth.

We also had a brilliant session with local residents and corporate volunteers working together to re-plant planters on Daubeney Road. We weeded and re-planted with pollinator friendly plants including various salvias, geraniums and culinary herbs which are both great for pollinators and also drought-tolerant. We engaged local residents by door knocking and trying to understand the residents' relationships with gardening and the planters which were put there some years earlier. They have shown appreciation for the attention to the area and some agreed to help us water the planters.

Integrate the three spaces on Clapton Park Estate into the ‘Hackney Buzzline’ – a 4km wildlife

corridor throughout Hackney

The Hackney Buzzline project is creating a 4 km pollinator corridor, linking up four parks (Mabley Green, Daubeney Fields, Millfields Park and Hackney Downs), by engaging communities in planting pollinator-rich meadows and flower beds in green spaces on estates, in school grounds and on streets.

Since April 2025, the Hackney Buzzline project has been facilitating weekly sessions on Clapton Park estate to attend to and rejuvenate a number of existing green spaces within the estate, planting for pollinators and creating habitats for pollinators, insects and other wildlife. We will continue our work on the estate throughout the summer working on 6 sites in total. Forthcoming sessions will involve habitat creation, bee hotel maintenance, gabion planter creation, planting for pollinators and some sign-making. We will hold sessions near Mandeville school at pick-up times to engage school children and parents, local residents who may otherwise not know of our project or may be less engaged.

Monitor the increase in biodiversity of these sites and share this with local and national recording

schemes where possible

Our Community Ecologist has carried out weekly bee and butterfly transect surveys on Daubeney Fields (to the south of Clapton Park Estate) and Millfields Park (to the North of the estate) during survey seasons (March - October) in 2024 and 2025. He has identified 17 different butterfly species and 32 bee species across the two parks to date. Since

March 2025 our Postcode Gardener has been conducting a weekly transect walk on Clapton Park Estate, to find out which pollinators are present. Four of the butterfly species and 10 of the bee species found in the parks have been identified on the estate this spring. Summer species are only just beginning to emerge, so we will have further data available as the year progresses.

One interesting finding is the abundance and diversity of bee species found in a long strip of rough grass along Denton Way near Millfields Park - including Early bumblebees, Mourning bees and Ashy mining bees. For the last two years, our Ecologist has found Ashy mining bees in the parks to the north of the estate (Millfields and Hackney Downs) but not to the south (Daubeney Fields and Mabley Green). We found Mourning bees for the first time this year only on Millfields and Denton Way. This suggests that Clapton Park estate offers two ecological functions. First it provides complementary habitat - augmenting habitat availability found on the parks for more common generalist pollinator species. Secondly it has potential to act as an ecological corridor, allowing for the dispersal and range expansion of more scarce and specialist species. The butterfly data collected last year showed how the expansion of relaxed mowing areas and creation of meadow areas in the parks is supporting grassland butterfly species rarely found elsewhere in the parks. A similar kind of habitat enhancement along verges and green spaces on housing estates could facilitate functional connectivity between parks to connect isolated populations of specialist species. However, there are cultural issues in the establishment of strips and patches of rough grass/vegetation on verges and green spaces. Many people associate it with neglect, and want it to look tidier. Enhancing these 'wilder' areas with pollinator friendly flowers may help overcome their concerns.

Collaborate with stakeholders and other local organisations to achieve these goals.

Throughout the project ecoACTIVE has worked in close collaboration with a number of key stakeholders, including Clapton Park Tenants Management Organisation, Hackney Council’s Community Gangs Team, Hackney Council’s Parks Team and Biodiversity Officer, Pedro Youth Club, Clapton Green Gym, Tree Musketeers, Hackney School of Food, Mandeville Primary School, Clapton Park Children’s Centre, and Woodshop of Recycled Delights. This connected up working has allowed us to extend our reach and engage more residents, and hopefully ensure that the impact of the funding lasts long into the future.