New campaign builds community at Imperial through green spaces
A new campaign with support from the Union, RE:GEN, seeks to improve our green spaces to create a sense of being at home and third spaces at Imperial. Emilio Garcia Padron, a part time Masters student, grew the campaign organically out of a desire to improve the secret garden (Princes Gate Garden), which has been neglected in recent decades.
Emilio explained Imperial’s roots in gardening to Felix, “The campus is built on the first ever Royal Horticultural Garden, and it was the headquarters for the National Royal Horticultural Society. Slowly, Imperial rebuilt what used to be our garden into research facilities and in the 60s brought everything down. Even though it has been 150 years since those original foundations, there are still lingering impacts. This is what we wanted to restore and protect.”
RE:GEN’s work started in Chaplaincy garden, when they secured £39 k from the President’s Community Fund. They plan to use this on creating raised beds, a greenhouse, and new tools by the end of the academic year, and they have big plants for reinventing other spaces at Imperial, including the secret garden, Beit quad, and Queen’s Gardens. J&L Gibbons, who designed the Natural History Museum’s garden, has created render for each of these spaces, see for example Beit, below, which is also on their timeline this academic year.
Emilio and Nico Henry, Deputy President (Welfare), who’s supporting Emilio with RE:GEN, want to create effective third spaces for students. They hope this will happen not only through the gardening itself, which provides a community and activity outside of work and home, but also through the finished spaces, which should be much more appropriate for relaxing. Nico explained the situation in Beit quad, “It’s a bit like a Cambridge quad in the sense that you can walk on it, but you wouldn’t walk on it, because there’s nothing there. [Beit Quad] is some students’ back gardens, and they might chill in their back garden if it was nice.”
Beyond Beit, the secret garden is a 10,000 square metre space that has been generally neglected. It’s a large space, but the name betrays the problem: people don’t know about it. RE:GEN is working with Environmental Society who maintain an area inside the secret garden to improve the space, in line with their goal of third spaces.
Gardening, in its nature, is excellent at forming bonds. It forces you to work with and alongside people. RE:GEN are keen to continue their work and want to show their impact where possible. They currently use stories from students who participated to show their impact to Imperial. One example was a student at Lancaster university who joined their community garden and “came for the vegetables but stayed for the people.”
RE:GEN also plans to run hackathons. Emilio hopes to run an ideas challenge with the Enterprise Lab this year, but both Nico and Emilio have plans for a collaboration with all constituent unions in the future. They want to use Imperial’s gardens to start hackathons that address big issues in planetary health, like sustainable irrigation, soil health, and pesticide use.
Both Emilio and Nico were impressed by Imperial’s engagement with this project. The college recently hired their first ever Head Gardener, Lucy Hand, and are working with RE:GEN on the designs for Beit. Emilio added it would be “a tremendous waste of potential to not have the students at imperial lead this transition” which lines up with Nico’s focus on employment and creating opportunities for students.
Monday saw our first bulb planting session with Lucy Hand. They plan to continue similar sessions to get students involved in gardening, and Nico wants to offer paid roles for getting involved in the transformation of Beit quad as part of a ‘green office’ model.
