Community Gardens in Kings Cross
A family of temporary community gardens has, move by move, established a permanent stake for young people and nature in one of Europe’s largest development sites.
The decades-long regeneration of Kings Cross transformed extensive railway lands to the rear of the station. Although primarily industrial, the site is surrounded by historic residential neighbourhoods. In this dense and often deprived city centre context, green space and waterways will be critical to supporting healthy, sociable lives. All too often, regeneration excludes local residents from decision-making processes that affect their local neighbourhood.
This is where youth climate advocacy charity Global Generation comes in. A mission to connect personal development to social and environmental justice through the creation of communal gardens, saw them establish their first foothold in Kings Cross on an office building rooftop. In 2009, the charity landed on solid ground in a vacant site awaiting development. Construction waste from the surrounding development, including skips repurposed as planters, was used deliberately to support a new community garden while sparking conversations around sustainability. Within the scale and complex phasing of the Kings Cross development, the idea was that the skips could be relatively simply picked up and moved as one site came forward for construction and a new plot became available.
JKA first became involved in 2015 as Global Generation were about to move onto their fourth site at the top of Tapper Walk.
The charity had already established a committed network among the surrounding residential and business communities. The creation of the next Skip Garden would be a chance to renew these connections. By challenging each student in Jan and Julia King’s undergraduate design unit at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) to design and construct a part of the garden, the project would expand its reach to nearby academic institutions while creating indelible educational experiences. The emerging network of construction industry professionals the students drew on for technical support, material donations and sponsorship was made concrete by building together on volunteering days. The resulting Garden was a dense, living showcase of natural and re-used materials imbued by the power of building together to build community and knowledge.
The availability of a site on the other side of the railway tracks just to the rear of the British Library offered the opportunity to deepen relationships with knowledge institutions. The site, much larger than the Tapper Walk Skip Garden, would also allow Global Generation to continue community building through the lifetime of the garden. JKA designed a simple set of core facilities, in effect little more than a kitchen, toilets, two polytunnels and an interconnecting set of pathways, to sit on existing irregular concrete footings. The remainder of the site, while loosely planned, remained open for incremental additions in response to the Garden’s needs and new collaborators.
The resulting Story Garden opened in time to receive structures, and of course skips, from the Tapper Walk site. Over time, a straw bale roundhouse, a container-based workshop, a kiln and an earthen playscape emerged in the landscape. As well as offering allotment beds to Somers Town residents, the garden hosted long-term collaborations with Central St. Martin’s (newly re-housed at Granary Square in the heart of the Kings Cross development), UCL and of course the British Library.
From this core site, we helped Global Generation to expand their outreach with a mobile kitchen in an electric milk float, capable of visiting courtyards in the surrounding residential neighbourhoods for community feasts using home-grown produce. Next, a canal barge was re-fitted as a floating garden and teaching space to bring conversations around sustainability to the emerging commercial centre of Kings Cross and an opportunity for young people to engage with the waterway. In parallel, Global Generation expanded to take on a site south of the river in Surrey Quays (the Paper Garden).
At each stage, we worked together with Global Generation to shape a project around the opportunities of site, community and potential funding sources to maximise their outreach and impact.
From this emerged a model whereby construction of new community spaces could be funded as a training programme, rather than as a capital project. The building site became a classroom, not just for young trainees, but for JKA and Global Generation as the collaboration helped to reciprocally build capacities in community building and natural construction.
Meanwhile, with each garden, Global Generation’s network of supporters and collaborators grew, together with their credibility and track record of social impact. These factors were key in Global Generation securing a 999 year lease for a wedge of land between railway lines at the northeast of the Kings Cross development. We began work on proposals for this ‘Triangle Site’ in 2022, securing planning permission for the garden, a classroom, a small office and a kitchen, each a tiny experimental prototype in natural construction.
With plans taking shape, Global Generation were able to begin preparing building components at the Paper Garden, teaching hundreds of volunteers to make their own personalised sweet chestnut shakes and clay bricks over two years. When construction concluded on the adjacent residential block, work on the proper site could finally begin, welcoming thousands more volunteers to participate in cob construction using clay won from excavations elsewhere in Kings Cross in weekly twilight building sessions and monthly community build days. While innovative in their assembly, the structures draw on historic vernacular knowledge, allowing Global Generation to secure support from the National Lottery Heritage Funding to train a cohort on young people in traditional construction techniques.
Construction is set to complete in spring 2026. As well as accumulating plants, materials and structures from surrounding sites and previous projects, the Triangle Ecology Garden brings together two decades of knowledge, skills, relationships and goodwill. The shape that the succession of gardens is now settling into into was far from evident at the start, but a shared commitment to participative methods and sustainable futures allowed each iteration to make the most of site-specific opportunities while deliberately building impact and longevity.
