The National Trust in London aims to support a fairer London by addressing unequal access to nature, beauty and history where people live. We’re doing this by improving existing green space, protecting cherished local heritage sites and supporting people to participate with green space and heritage on their own terms. Find out more about our projects across London below.
We collaborated with Transport for London during the Festival of Blossom 2024 to create two pop-up gardens - one at Highbury & Islington station and another at Hounslow Bus Garage - created using recycled oil drums and planted with blossom trees, these mini urban gardens also feature colourful plants chosen with pollinators in mind. The planters have now become permanent features at the stations, helping to support urban biodiversity and brighten commuters’ journeys across the capital.
The collaboration will continue this year, with more permanent garden spaces set to be announced soon.
As part of this collaboration, we also visited Morden station to talk to Anthony Samuel, Customer Service Manager, to find out about the station garden he's created and how plants can have a positive effect on mental health.
Stoneford Community Garden is a 0.5-acre garden for the residents of the Leys Estate and nearby communities in East Dagenham, which opened in 2022. Local residents have been helping us look after nature in the garden as well as cultivating new plants and wildlife and developing the space so it feels safer, more accessible and welcoming for the community.
There is a weekly programme of fun activities for families and young people, plus volunteering days for people to get involved in.
Follow @StonefordCommunityGardenNT on Facebook or @StonefordNT on Instagram for updates.
Octavia Hill, one of the National Trust's founders, had a strong connection to Lewisham, having fought to save Sayes Court for public use in 1884. She believed that access to nature should be for everyone, for ever.
We have been working with a coalition of organisations in Lewisham – including DeptfordFolk, Lewisham Council, Everest, local Tenants and Residents Associations for the Pepys Estate, to develop a ‘Greenspace Toolkit’ for Evelyn Ward. The plan looks at how green spaces can be created, enhanced and managed with communities, for communities.
One of the projects within the Toolkit is the Sayes Court Garden Network project, which is seeking to help more people access and use the green spaces on the Sayes Court Estate. A copy of the Toolkit is available here.
Find out more about Greening Evelyn with this short film: Greening Evelyn vision
We’ve also partnered with Street Trees for Living to support their ambitious work to plant blossom trees throughout the borough. Over 300 trees have been planted since 2020, with more planned.
“We all want quiet. We all want beauty. We all need space. Unless we have it we cannot reach that sense of quiet in which whispers of better things come to us gently.”
The Wandle is a 23.5km stretch of green and blue weaving through South London, shared by neighbourhoods across Wandsworth, Merton, Sutton and Croydon. It is a place rich in Nature, a rare chalk stream home to brown trout and kingfishers, and History, from medieval monasteries to the printing works of William Morris and Liberty. Today, it’s a thriving area for both business and leisure.
The National Trust is part of the Wandle Valley Regional Park Trust (WVRPT), a charity established in 2013 by nine organisations interested in protecting and enhancing this unique place: the London Boroughs of Wandsworth, Merton, Sutton and Croydon, the Environment Agency, Natural England, South East Rivers Trust, the National Trust, and the Wandle Valley Forum, representing more than 150 community groups and voluntary organisations with a shared passion for the Wandle.
The aim of the charity is to provide the leadership and coordination of a sub-regional partnership and improve the effectiveness, coherence, resilience and quality of the Wandle Valley.
These partners are developing a new joint initiative to protect and enhance the River Wandle, its greenspaces and the Wandle Trail; to maintain and grow the multiple benefits they provide for People and Nature; and ensure that these benefits extend further, by connecting the Wandle to other greenspaces and their local communities across the Wandle Valley, in a web.
A number of projects in different locations will contribute to the delivery of this vision.
With support from the GLA’s Green and Resilient Spaces fund, the National Trust has been working in one of the greenspaces along the Wandle, known as Pickle Park.
The park is named after Pickle Ditch, a small stream which comes off the River Wandle in Colliers Wood near Phipps Bridge and rejoins the Wandle underneath Merton Bridge. Owned by the National Trust, the greenspace covers 500sqm, with the 12th-century Merton Priory Precinct Wall running through it.
The ambition is to turn this currently inaccessible area into a new riverside park and provide access to both the medieval wall and to newly restored, nature rich, greenspace.
With the help of the Community Payback Scheme, rangers and volunteers from nearby Morden Hall Park cleared a huge jumble of brambles so that surveys could be carried out and repair works to the medieval wall could begin.
In autumn 2022, an initial consultation was completed with local young people, coordinated by Living Proof, to understand what residents want from their greenspaces.
Using the results of the consultation and the surveys, the young people then worked with the landscape designer Turkington Martin and the project team to develop concept designs for Pickle Park.
Watch this short video to learn more about the role of the young people in the project: Working with Youth Consultants at Pickle Park
The careful restoration of the medieval wall is also underway, thanks to the support of the Heritage of London Trust, and will be completed later in 2025.
This has included public activities and events organised with the neighbouring Merton Priory Chapter House that celebrated and brought local history and archaeology to life.
Following the Wandle Trail
One of 8 city-based collaborations within the pioneering Future Parks Accelerator, Camden and Islington Borough Councils have been working together since 2019, alongside the National Trust and National Lottery Heritage Fund, to reduce barriers that prevent people from using parks. They’ve been developing new health and wellbeing offers in parks, including partnering with public health teams, GPs, the Voluntary, Community, and Social Enterprise sector and NHS commissioners around green social prescribing. Together they’ve created the Camden and Islington Parks for Health strategy 2022-2030.
Building on this successful initiative, we are working with the boroughs as they embark on an ambitious grey to green retrofit programme to turn hundreds of ‘stub’ roads into new pocket parks and orchards, as well as finding ways to integrate green infrastructure (such as sustainable drainage) into the development of their roads and pavements. In Islington alone, their plans equate to roughly 6 hectares of new green space (that’s an additional 10% of the area of their current parks) and could significantly reduce green deficit at a neighbourhood level, reduce flood risk, increase wellbeing and social benefits.
2016
In July 2016, the National Trust in London explored the contemporary heritage of Croydon and cast a spotlight on the borough as one of the most important examples of the post-war ambition to build a new society. The project's aim was to challenge perceptions of heritage as country houses and coastlines, and celebrate the places where people live, work and play.
Our key partner: The Mayor of London is responsible for making London a better place for everyone who visits, lives or works in the city.
An award winning group, founded to improve Deptford Park and Folkestone Gardens.
London’s independent heritage charity, set up in 1980 by the Greater London Council to rescue historic buildings and monuments.
An award-winning charity working with residents to transform urban areas with street trees, to improve the environment of the London Borough of Lewisham & beyond.
Images and videos from across London, with all of the latest project updates.
All of the latest updates from each of our projects across London.
From intimate spaces and modernist masterpieces to thriving wetlands and sprawling estates, London has it all, if you know where to look.
