Yes Make's Community Garden Workshop

Aim

To build a beautiful community workshop at the Paper Garden.

We’d appreciate your help

We believe that access to beautiful things should not be limited by your ability to pay for them. To fulfil our philosophy, we marry architecture and urban design principles with woodworking techniques to create bespoke public spaces for parks, schools, hospitals, and community gardens across London. 

Through our projects, we have transformed community spaces by engaging in a co-creation and co-design process with community residents and stakeholders ensuring that their insights and needs are at the core of any transformation efforts. Our social values have reflected through our work to such a degree that in running a series of workshops with Global Generation for their young volunteers, they invited us to share their community garden (Paper Garden) site in Canada Water with them, providing us a space to build the workshop. Until now, most of our projects have been carried out on-site in local communities, however, our vision is to create a space where we can provide schools and charities with a place to train and upskill individuals, including those from disadvantaged groups. It will also be the home of Yes Make, where the design and fabrication of structures will take place.

Impact for social good

Approximately 9000 trees come down in London every year and by default, they are chopped, chipped and incinerated. Meanwhile, commercial timber is imported from abroad. We utilise a circular economy model, re-using these trees to create beautiful public spaces that bring people together. In under two years, we have been recognised by the Greater London Authority and the Mayor of London for our work. We have partnerships with local charities and our past clients include the Tate Modern and Great Ormond Street Hospital. Earlier this year, we were selected for Microsoft’s prestigious ‘AI for Environmental Sustainability’ start-up development programme, which provided training and resources to increase environmental and social impact.

How we’ve made an impact

We’d like to take you on a little tour of some of the work we’ve done with local people in the last two years:

• The Ark, Hither Green

Check out the build video using this link…

This is a space in Lewisham that we built during the pandemic transforming 12 car parking spaces into a sustainable, people-friendly space. It was built to support the local businesses on the street to trade outside through the pandemic and through that we were able to make a huge impact for their businesses, as well as for the wider community.

• Beuy’s Acorns, Tate Modern

For this project, we worked with Tate Modern and British artists Ackroyd & Harvey to install a living piece of activism art titled ‘Beuy’s Acorns.’ During this project, we were able to experiment with wood lamination to create curved spaces as seen in the image above. 

• Global Generation Classroom, the Paper Garden

In collaboration with Global Generation, we are proud to be constructing London’s largest circular economy project and the UK’s largest cord-wood masonry construction. Our co-founders, Joel and Morgan erected the timber framing utilizing railway sleepers donated by National Rail. With the help of hundreds of volunteers of all ages we have been laying the cordwood masonry to finish the walls. This structure will house Global Generation’s classrooms, a community kitchen and a co-working space for local enterprises.

• GOSH Parklet, Great Ormond Street

We worked with Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital to green this parking space by transforming it into outdoor seating for patients and visitors to the hospital to enjoy. Yes Sadiq Khan!

Who we are

We are a collective of artists, sculptors, makers and nature lovers seeking to use our talents and skills to build the future we want to see for our city. Follow this link to get to know us better!

This project closed unsuccessfully on 21st November 2022