Tooting’s Green Sanctuary Reinvents Itself

After over ten years of flourishing as a vibrant oasis in the heart of Tooting, the Tooting Community Garden will go into a period of transformation. For local residents the garden has long offered a place where wilderness and community spirit met. Now, as a new development takes shape, the garden faces its next chapter.

Development and Change

The largest portion of the cherished green space will soon make way for a new, though long-planned, project: eight assisted living flats.

While the reduction in size marks a significant change for the garden – the loss of wild space and refuge for all the animals loving rotting wood and leafy corners (look at our Instagram for the biodiversity we have!)

Nevertheless, we see it as a new beginning. Planning approval was granted on the condition that the community garden would remain, ensuring its legacy continues in a reimagined guise. We are grateful for the ongoing commitment from Naseem Aboobaker to our gardening cause.

Looking Forward

Though the footprint of the garden may shrink, its ambitions for it remain unchanged. We are determined to maintain a dedicated space for growing, learning, and fostering sustainable practices and we are working with the architect to maintain as much of what has become ‘our’ space as possible.

Over the coming six months, our focus will shift to a horticultural rescue mission: identifying which of our perennials to keep and for which we might be seeking new homes—or perhaps even foster plots—for our surplus plants. With a touch of hope, we imagine a handful of these plants as the first seeds of what will become the Fishponds community garden.

This oasis began its journey many years ago in summer 2012, emerging from the brambles behind 5, North Drive. Starting out with preparing beds to grow vegetables of the years we added trees and shrubs and fruit bushes. So many of those donated to find a new home as people had to leave their gardens or had to much success with their planting.

When developers took away the small woodland that bordered our sanctuary, we seized the opportunity—introducing a patch of flax and carving out a potato plot, breathing new life into every inch of the reclaimed ground.

Not to forget, the herb bed created and tended to by our friend Rose until the very last weeks of her life. The new community garden will hold a space that will be Rose’s bed.