At the start of the pandemic Ellen Miles was cooped up in a gardenless London flat, bored and fed up.
Victoria Park had been so mobbed that Tower Hamlets council locked its gates, and Miles was sick of sitting on the sofa.
“I was trapped and wanting to connect to nature,” she says.
Then a friend told her how to make seed bombs, a mix of wildflower seeds with (peat free, please) compost and red clay, and she decided to give it a go.
On her daily lockdown walks around Clapton, Miles carried a few in her pockets and when she saw a dismal patch of bare earth she threw in a bomb.
Over the months that followed, Miles’s horticultural activities escalated.
“I was trapped and wanting to connect to nature.”
She put out feelers on her local Nextdoor group and was astounded by the response. Some of her neighbours wanted to go planting with her, others were willing to donate surplus seeds, cuttings and excess plants from their gardens. Local community gardens were also keen to chip in with supplies, and Miles found herself an accidental guerilla gardener leading weekly planting expeditions.
All over the capital Londoners like Miles are doing their bit to give their environments a glow up.
And loving thy neighbourhood can bear dividends far beyond the pride Miles feels when she walks past a sprouting patch of bulbs and thinks: “I did that.”
“Before the pandemic I had never really gardened before, I learned to garden on the streets,” she says.
“I have really come to love planting these tiny seeds and bulbs and then seeing wildflowers in spring, and bees around the lavender I have planted.”
“I have really come to love planting these tiny seeds.”
Group members now meet about once a month to plant bulbs and sow seeds, prune existing shrubs, augment sad municipal flower beds with extra plants, and create new planters in unexpected spots.
Currently they are busy replanting The Island, a once desolate triangle of flower bed on Median Road which is regularly dug up by Thames Water, and building a planter close to the Hackney Bumps skate park at Daubeney Fields.
The council, says Miles, tends to turn a blind eye to their activities.
“Was I surprised by how interested people were? Absolutely,” says Miles, 30.
“When we were planting people would walk past and want to get involved. I have lived in Hackney all my life, and I never really felt a sense of community until I started doing this and started connecting with people from all generations and walks of life.”
“Was I surprised by how interested people were? Absolutely.”
If this sounds good then Miles — who has a hybrid career as a freelance campaign strategist, writer and now expert on urban gardening — has set up Dream Green as a resource for others keen to beautify their neighbourhoods with planting in neglected municipal beds, around street trees, and other tiny, neglected areas.
Local glow ups come in many different forms.
Miles’s focus is sustainability, but in Acton what Amanda Mason wanted to create was a new local cultural hub.
Mason has lived in Acton for almost 30 years, and when her two daughters were young they often visited the Victorian library on the high street. In 2014, the Grade II listed building was closed down, the victim of funding cuts.
“This beautiful building was just standing there, boarded up and empty.”
“Initially my concern was what was going to happen to this beautiful building, which was just standing there, boarded up and empty,” says Mason.
Other locals felt the same way and when rumours began to circulate that Curzon Cinemas was interested in taking over the building there was great excitement.
The deal never materialised, but the idea of a local, independent cinema for Acton had taken hold.
Mason was, at the time, running a local film club and she was “roped in” to join a committee of people keen to explore the idea of setting up a new community-run cinema.
Between 2017 and 2021 the group negotiated with Ealing council, using crowd-funding platform Spacehive to raise money to cover their initial costs — legal fees, surveys, and so on. They were overwhelmed when just over £115,000 was pledged.
“The people of Acton have been fantastic,” says Mason, now 64.
“The people of Acton have been fantastic.”
Finally, in April 2021, the committee signed a lease on the old library and their real work began.
“When we first got the building it was trashed,” says Mason, a bookkeeper. “We had a whole team of volunteers who cleared, cleaned and painted it, and took up the horrible old flooring. We would never have been able to do it without them.”
A second fundraising drive raised another £63,000 which helped pay to fit out the ActOne Cinema’s first screen.
The DIY auditorium opened in October 2021 with second-hand seats bought from a Picturehouse cinema which was closing down, and a pre-loved projector which promptly broke down.
The project has received about £150,000 in funding from organisations including the GLA and the local Business Improvement District. The rest, about £180,000, has come through the local community, with hundreds of people donating anything from a few quid to several thousands of pounds.
The whole process has been a massive learning curve for Mason; setting up a cinema from scratch is not for the fainthearted.
“Its not easy money, hand over fist, but it is ticking over.”
“We work very hard on it,” she says.
Today, ActOne is a hive of activity, with two cinema screens and a programme including films, open mic nights and live screenings of National Theatre productions. There is a café and bar in the building, and the upper floors are leased to an adult education centre, which helps with the rent.
“The building looks great, and it is becoming quite established,” says Mason.
“Its not easy money, hand over fist, but it is ticking over and it is nice to see that.”
ActOne has very much been a team effort. But Carrie Reichardt’s project to turn her own house into a spectacular piece of free public art has been a solo labour of love.
Over two decades Reichardt has used her dull suburban home as an enormous canvas, covering it in hundreds of thousands of mosaic tiles to create a monumental piece of free public art inspired by everything from Alice in Wonderland to tiki bars.
“This was not a beautiful old house, it was covered in pebbledash.”
The result is unexpected and joyful and has turned her street in Chiswick into something of a tourist attraction.
“You’ve got to understand that I do have a lot of respect for architecture, and for old things,” says Reichardt.
“But this was not a beautiful old house, it was covered in pebbledash, and it was an eyesore.” Reichardt’s father had bought the house in the late Fifties, and later converted it into bedsits.
In the mid-Nineties when her eldest child was born, Reichardt moved in full time. She was, by that time, working as a mosaic artist — often being hired by councils and schools to enliven public buildings.
“I got sick of people telling me what I could and could not do,” she says.
“I wanted to write “You are murdering the planet”, but they wanted platitudes. I was living in the house by then and I thought: “I am going to turn it into an uncensored piece of public art.”
She worked on the house in small sections, starting around the door with patterns inspired by the Indian tapestries she saw around Southall, where she was working at the time.
“I got sick of people telling me what I could and could not do.”
More sections followed, including the war cry: “I’m an artist your rules don’t apply” emblazoned on the front façade.
“I have always seen the house like someone who is covered in tattoos, all from different times in their lives,” says Reichardt, now 57.
Over the years she plugged on, her efforts interrupted by a further two children, partners coming and going, her day job, the death of her mother and the menopause.
For most of this time she didn’t actually own the property — her father opted to give it to her sister. But, three years ago, she passed it on to Reichardt.
The project is still not quite complete.
A bare section at the back of the house is crying out for some inspiration (and a lot of scaffolding to reach it). But it is still eye-catching enough to draw crowds, all filming away for their social media or just standing and staring.
Reichardt says she doesn’t mind the attention. “If there are a lot of people outside I sometimes go out of the back door.”
She has had no push back from Ealing council about her work — “there is no law against adding tiling to the front of a house, unless its in a Conservation Area” — and the vast majority of her neighbours love it.
“A couple of people did try to do a petition against it, years ago, but nobody wanted to sign it,” says Reichardt. “The thing is we are so bombarded by visual pollution like adverts, but public art is a wonder. It is about making people feel better.”
She thinks locals have embraced her house partly because it has come together so slowly.
“And people love eccentricity, it makes them see that it is OK to be different,” she says.
