PROJECT ACTIVITIES
As part of the Grow For Good Project, in addition to researching, collating and presenting the wealth of heritage discoveries on this site, our team of volunteers have also been sharing and disseminating this fruitful history through a variety of public events and activities.
The Heritage Shed is a loving recreation of our favourite shed on our allotment at Tolworth Main, built by Kingston University MA Architecture students and designed to tour an exhibition of research and oral histories discovered through this project. The Shed has visited the V&A Museum, The Garden Museum and The Hampton Court Flower Show where it picked up a Silver Medal, as well as a variety of locations across the borough.
Local allotment holders have run a number of workshops in local primary schools sharing our discovered heritage through the physical act of planting and growing. School children have learnt about allotmenteering through the ages by planting Victorian, war-time and modern allotment plots in their outdoor spaces.
Volunteers from the local community have begun to transform spaces in the borough to become pocket growing spaces. Gradually unused large timber benches along the Tolworth Broadway have been planted up and turned into beautiful planters containing various themed plots including bee and butterfly friendly, edible, sensory and air purifying.
Volunteers and graduate students are installing a Suburban Farm into a large shed and adjoining hard-standing land previously used for storage, on our Tolworth Main allotment site. The venue is trialing an aquaponics system, raised beds, bee hives and mushroom growing and will become a space for workshops, training and business idea experimentation on a small scale.
The project has served as such an inspiration for so many people involved that we applied for additional funding from the GLA to continue and grow the project. This has now become a much larger project called SHEDx which aims to deliver community-led regenerations amid larger scale transformation by re-imagining space both urban and green through interventions and creative opportunities.
Visit https://www.shedx.org for more details