How do you create an urban garden where people and nature can thrive?

After years of careful planning, our new gardens have finally come to life. Curved around the front of the Museum, the new green space leads visitors on a journey through geological and biological time, delighting them in the discovery of the natural world along the way.?

We designed these gardens to have inclusivity at their heart and want everyone to feel like this magical space is for them. We also worked hard to place local communities at the front and centre of our garden’s public programming.?

To do this, we included local communities and diverse voices from the very beginning of the project.?

A knowledge exchange?

Months before our new gardens opened to the public, a group of young people huddled together outside the Museum on a cool, wet day in early spring. They were standing in a muddy building site, gathered around one of the oldest rocks in the UK. They were sharing words and ideas about the gardens under construction around them.?

Facilitated by spoken word artist Testament, the group included blind and partially blind young people. They were co-creating poems for the garden’s audio guide, sharing their thoughts and reactions to stories of the garden’s rocks, plants and sculptures told by Museum scientists.??

This exchange of knowledge and the co-creation of content between those with diverse lived experience and the Museum was crucial in disrupting the standard top-down approach to public programming.??

Creating an inclusive garden?

The central ambition for our new gardens was to create a welcoming and inclusive green space where people and wildlife can co-exist.??

To achieve this, the UNP (Urban Nature Project) team embedded EDI (equity, diversity and inclusion) principles across all their working practices. From the earliest design stages, we worked with experts, consultants and focus groups to draw on lived experience and ensure that the garden’s design met accessibility best practices and that all our visitors can have access to nature in our gardens.??

As a result of this work, we included tactile, sensory-rich interpretations throughout the gardens and a changing places toilet. We built a new wheelchair accessible and step-free sunken pathway between our ponds to give greater access to activities such as pond dipping.??

We commissioned an audio guide to bring the stories of our gardens to life with spoken word. To help inform this work, a lived experience expert on navigating museums as a blind or partially blind person shared how she uses audio to interpret and navigate museum spaces.??

In our new education programme, tactile 3D models of insects offer different ways of understanding garden life, including enabling school students to touch model dragonfly larvae jaws to sense how terrifying they are.??

We also are working towards having sign-language interpreted videos for our school sessions and family activities.??

Creating with communities??

The Museum’s local borough (the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea) is an incredibly culturally diverse area, and we worked with community groups to embed stories in the garden that matter to them. We also wanted our garden to be a place that our community felt welcome.??

“The primary aim for the majority of our programming can be summarised as enabling first steps for those furthest away,” says Harriet Fink, our Urban Nature Project Learning and Volunteering Programme Manager.?

“In communicating what this looks like in terms of specific activities, sessions and resources, I really like this phrase from one of our community partners – activities should have a ‘low entry barrier, a high ceiling and wide walls’. In other words, they should be easy and enjoyable to join and take part in but enable significant and meaningful learning that encompasses a wide range of interests and abilities,” she says.?

A good example of such an activity are the workshops that crafted tiles for our new Nature Activity Centre supported by Amazon Web Services. Four different community groups near the Museum took part in these workshops where participants imprinted leaves collected locally onto tiles with slip clay techniques. This small piece of our local community will live on in the gardens.??

“When we ask for people to join us for our volunteering and apprenticeship opportunities, we have taster days, and where possible do these in community-based spaces. We also advertise in spaces such as community cafes, community centres, and religious spaces to explicitly show the offer is open to all,” says Harriet.??

Planter boxes in the gardens are filled with plants chosen by a group of people who live local to nearby training college, Morley College. They chose plants that mean something to them and told their stories of connection to the plant. You can see these plants growing if you visit the gardens and you can also listen to their stories online. Some of those who took part in the project now volunteer at the Museum, sharing their time and expertise to help maintain the planters as well as other areas of the gardens.??

Set in the concrete paths of our garden are the bronze footprints of the young people who helped us document the garden’s construction with photography. The work of these young photographers was displayed in our images of nature gallery throughout the year, but their physical footprints will leave their mark in our gardens for much, much longer.??

“What was lovely, was seeing some the young people and their families come back time and time again across the project. They have real ownership of the gardens and we're looking forward to working with them and local organisations for years to come.” Says Emma Slater, Community and Youth Engagement Manager at the Museum.?

Removing barriers to access our gardens?

We wanted to avoid replicating the barriers that stop local communities from accessing the Museum, so we worked in ways that allowed community groups to lead our public programming.??

“Every time we went to our community partners, we asked them what they wanted,” says Harriet. “This different way of working in partnerships underpinned everything we did. We wanted to share the oxygen of the Urban Nature Project (UNP) with local groups.”??

For example, we asked a local community garden, Meanwhile Gardens in North Kensington, what they needed. They told us they wanted to send out activity packs to families during the pandemic but didn’t have the resources or time to do so. So, we worked with them to send activity packs full of story books and outdoor activities to local families.??

Harriet says, “this was a really great collaboration, and it led to us working together to make a film of the Ananse story.”?

Meanwhile Gardens also wanted better relationships with their local schools, so we helped them deliver pilot school sessions as well as establishing a pond in their gardens that they could use in their education programmes.??

Working with young people?

Consulting underrepresented groups was a great way to bring new perspectives on our garden design. One of these groups was our youth advisory panel.??

There have been three youth advisory panels throughout the life of the UNP project. The first was 12 young people who looked at the barriers for people from marginalised ethnic backgrounds accessing green spaces. The second was a panel made up of seven young people from around the UK who made TikTok content about nature in their cities and towns.??

The third group of people working on the project were blind and partially blind young people who interpreted the gardens with poems. These poems are included in the gardens audio guide and this innovative approach to audio guides is currently being studied by researchers at Westminster University, who will be publishing the details and outcomes in the future.??

Other focus groups included local community residents and partners and time-poor parents who live in cities and towns. Everyone’s opinions and lived experience were listened to and acted upon throughout the project.?

Looking to the future?

We’ve learnt so much from working in partnership with our local community, and we hope our gardens are a richer and more welcoming place because of it. Now they’re open, we’re working on ways to maintain and grow the relationships we’ve built so that the knowledge sharing can continue.??

Thank you to all our partners, community groups, organisations and individuals who have taken part in the Urban Nature Project. We can’t wait to see where those relationships take us next.?

We thank the wide variety of trusts, foundations, companies and individuals who have generously supported the Urban Nature Project including Amazon Web Services, The National Lottery Heritage Fund, Evolution Education Trust, The Cadogan Charity, Garfield Weston Foundation, Kusuma Trust, The Wolfson Foundation, Charles Wilson and Rowena Olegario, Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, Clore Duffield Foundation, Workman LLP and Accenture.?