In the hidden gardens of London, women are digging, potting and planting — and sowing seeds of community at the same time.

Words Divya Venkataraman

Around the corner from one of London’s busiest train stations, in the melee of London’s east, was once an old, overgrown patch of land. For decades, railway tracks ran through it, connecting these ramshackle parts of town to the city’s financially thrumming centre, but since the Eastern Curve line fell out of use in the 50s, so too did the area. In 2010, it was handed divine deliverance: unexpectedly, by a group of volunteers and architects, who wanted to turn it into a space for elders, young families, migrants, and artists alike.

Now, in 2025, it hums with life and vitality: community gardeners dig and pot on Saturdays; patrons flit around a café spruiking espresso and thick, buttery muffins; a smattering of posters is tacked on the noticeboard; flyers held down by rocks announce movie nights and entice aspiring pianists to lessons. A sign welcomes visitors in handpainted acrylic pink: Keep Cities Wild.

“Gardens act as a commons, a place where women can meet beyond workplaces or schools, in everyday spaces shaped by people and create connections across generations and cultures,” explains nature rights activist and founder Kalpana Arias.

For Marie Murray, one of the co-founders of the garden, the effects that the garden provides for locals of the built-up borough are patently visible — how their “shoulders, which have been at their ears with tension, just completely relax.”

"That's really the number one purpose of coming to a space like this," Murray explains to Dezeen. "Just to be able to step away from that concrete and chill out, relax, but also quite often, to take part in activities that the green space makes it easier to participate in.”

Kate Poland, who founded Cordwainers Grow, a gardening collective that ran for many years in a space owned by the London College of Fashion, tells a similar story. Along with a small, sometimes haphazard but always welcoming community of people from around the area, she turned a disused ground into a thriving urban oasis teeming with artichokes, tomatoes, herbs, beehives and plants to make organic dye.

“I was witness to all these displays of ordinary generosity,” she says. “People feel compelled to share things, for some reason. They would show up, bring food, bring seeds, bring free plants, anything.”

Mostly, word travelled about the community space by word of mouth. That’s partly why, she says, it ended up being mostly women who joined her, tending to the soil and coaxing vegetables and flowers out of the urban earth. And another reason?

“Well, I suppose a lot of community gardening is just standing around chatting, really,” she laughs. “It doesn’t look like you’re doing anything.

“But really, you’re slowly, steadily building up a network.”

“You’re sowing seeds for that kind of connection later in life… not friends, necessarily, not always… but something like a web, you know?” 

It’s those kind of incidental connections that make the work of gardening, the fact of doing something with your hands, crucial for the kind of reprieve from the city that attracts people to it in the first place. It’s a simple power, the decision to tend to something real, that our world of digital overwhelm — particularly in urban settings — seldom allows.

“It’s a quiet, gentle kind of relationship. You’re doing other things, you’re digging and moving and walking… but they’re there and you’re there and there’s something special about that. Special in a different way.” 

Kalpana Arias’s work takes on a slightly different tenor. She is a guerrilla gardener, meaning that she — along with other community groups — takes over disused and neglected patches of land and turns them into gardens, vegetable patches and food sources, by “planting in tree pits” or “transforming scrubby corners into pollinator patches.” Each act is a small, localised intervention, but holds the potential to quietly change a neighbourhood — and locals’ interactions with it.

Arias started her work in South East Peckham, a bustling hub of various migrant communities in London. “What began as a few herbs and flowers quickly grew into conversations with local residents and neighbours,” she says. “Women came forward with recipes, seed swaps, and stories from their countries of origin.”

Her work evolved into Glitch, a mobile platform with an all-women-led team which aims to scale citizen action and gamify gardening across London. “Those first small acts of resistance inspired larger conversations about urban policy and citizen rights,” she explains.

Arias and her team encourage Londoners to claim their right to green space while highlighting the broader inequalities contained within how the land of their city is controlled and distributed. “We challenge the status quo and ask: why should land sit locked away when people are hungry, when our streets are overheated, when children need green space?”

Whether it’s in softness and “standing around chatting,” as in Poland’s work, or in Arias’ form of more large-scale radical resistance, the underlying message is the same. As Arias says, ‘“gardening is not just about plants.”

“It’s political, because when women garden, we’re building networks of care, resilience, and belonging for new possible futures.”

“By creating spaces where women can lead, rest, and connect with nature, we expand feminism beyond boardrooms and into the streets, gardens, and everyday life of the city.”