Always on
This project successfully funded on 12th February 2026, you can still support them with a donation.
This project successfully funded on 12th February 2026, you can still support them with a donation.
Rose was delighted when Islington Council found her a ground floor flat but she will need help in realising the potential of the garden.
Current Situation
I live in a flat on the fourth floor of the Taverner Estate, Highbury, N5. A lady called Rose has recently taken the tenancy of a ground floor flat which has access on to a 15ft x 35ft rectangular plot. She is a single mother whose lively three-year-old is recovering vigorously from having a brain tumour at birth. She would like to make the plot a useful and useable space for the two of them. She is happy to work on it but realises she is unlikely to be successful without more financial outlay than she can afford.
Recent Background
When the flats were renovated in 1981 this flat was occupied by an elderly man, called John, who cherished the garden in an old-fashioned allotment style. Since he died the flat has had several occupants but none who were able to maintain the garden. It has reverted to a barren condition.
Further Back
This estate, then called Addington Mansions, was built by the LCC in 1920 as part of the government’s post-war housing programme, specifically one of Lloyd George’s ‘homes for heroes.’. It was designed along the lines of the Arts and Crafts movement's ethos of reconnecting Londoners with the natural world, giving them gardens and creating open spaces, mimicking the village green. It has had a chequered history since then; and though it has been rescued from the disrepair into which it fell in the 1970s it is now diminished by the habit of those with gardens of erecting 6ft high fences around their plots, rather at odds with the intentions of the original builders to create an open, sociable, green environment.
In the 1920s there was a campaign, led by a notable landscape architect called Richard Sudell, to ‘beautify’ the nation’s housing estates. He was the subject of a recent biography, and of a lecture at the Garden Museum, by Michael Gilson. The estate fits exactly the profile of the sort of properties that would have been the subject of Sudell’s campaign.
I have an additional reason for wanting to make a garden on this site. My mother was apprenticed to Richard Sudell in the 1930s. She worked on his designs for, among others, the Selfridges roof garden, the window boxes at No. 10 Downing Street and the gardens of Dolphin Square. After the war she carried on Sudell’s mission, including designing for people with small back gardens through a postal design service operated by Practical Gardening magazine. I’m also a landscape gardener in a small way. Rose and I have drawn up a design for the garden and have started work on it. I should make it clear I’m not asking for a fee for the work: I’ll be working on behalf of a neighbour.
Rose and I would very much like this small garden to reflect this historic call-to-arms to make the gardens of public housing beautiful and functional.
Initial costings have put the price of this process at £3,000, covering materials for a small area of hard-standing, a trellis, a brick path, some rudimentary storage, some shrubs, climbers and perennials and a fee for specialist help ie. carpentry and brick-laying.
Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made