New Community Play Garden Opens in Brentford
London Museum of Water & Steam responds to local children's wishlist
Playhouses, sheds, and wildlife homes have been erected by volunteers
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A new community play garden has been opened at London Museum of Water & Steam.
Local families will be able to use their creativity and imagination with a new mud kitchen, building blocks and a music wall.
Families who regularly visit the Museum were asked recently about what they would like to see in the garden and the children said - a mud kitchen, balancing, building and lots of flowers for the butterflies and bees.
The Museum team hope that it has achieved all this for the local community.
With funding and support from the London Borough of Hounslow, a small area of the Museum’s existing gardens is being converted.
Originally the start of the filter beds from when the Museum was an active water pumping station, historic features have been turned into herb beds and a storytelling area. Then surrounded by gooseberry bushes a mud kitchen is ready for culinary delights with sample recipes provided by the pupils at Green Dragon Primary School. Imagineering blocks and other materials are ready for children to build new structures and in the summer there will hopefully be strawberries, plums and raspberries available for picking as well.
Where possible, items have been reused in new contexts, from pallet collars as raised vegetable beds, old barrels as game tables and old spanners and water barrels as musical instruments. Planting in the area has included herbs and perennial flowers donated by local residents and organisations that attract and support bees and butterflies.
EcoWorld London and Barratt London staff also helped out with the project. On one sunny Friday, 17 volunteers from Barratt London joined the museum team to get the area ready as they spent the day weeding, landscaping, painting and building.
Raised fruit and veg beds built using recycled pallet collars
Their volunteers built on the work already undertaken in this area by volunteer gardeners and volunteers from EcoWorld London.
Liz Power, Museum Director, said, “The new play garden will be an area where visiting families, schools and groups can explore and have fun. We are incredibly grateful for the support from the London Borough of Hounslow, Barratt London, EcoWorld London and others who are helping us create this amazing new resource for the community.”
One of the principles of this new garden is that as much of the equipment and facilities are as sustainable as possible, so as well as building a new play house, Barratt London volunteers also built a bug hotel and hedgehog home.
The space opens for the Queen’s Jubilee at 12 noon on Friday 2 June.
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June 3, 2022
