Global Generation

Connecting the urban environment and the natural world

They started with an experiment in an old skip. Now, they’re developing a project that will support thousands of people, plants, and wildlife for centuries to come.

Education charity Global Generation built their first movable community garden – the Skip Garden – in 2009. Since then, they’ve set up 4 more, each one bigger and more ambitious than the last. They’re all co-created with the local community and demonstrate how a disused urban space can become an oasis for people, plants and animals. This year, Global Generation is putting down roots for the first time with a permanent garden, The Triangle, which is being built on a brownfield site with a 1,000-year lease. We’ll be helping fund this project with a grant of £240,000. It’s our third grant to the charity. You can read about the previous ones here and here.

The Triangle will be co-created by the local community, including residents from Camden and Islington, refugees, students with special educational needs, children, young people, families and intergenerational groups. Together, they will build an office space and a classroom using traditional crafts, as well as creating the garden area.

From 2026, The Triangle will directly support over 2,000 people a year through programmes and workshops, as well as 3,000 more through events and outreach work.
12 local young people working on the project will have specific training in traditional and sustainable building approaches.
500 residents will help create the new garden, gaining new skills, improving their wellbeing, and becoming stewards for the new garden.

Peace in the city

The Triangle’s kitchen will be built from chestnut wood cladding; the classroom will have a cob wall and a green roof; and handmade clay bricks will be used in the office space. Much of the chestnut wood cladding and bricks have already been created at community workshops. Moving outdoors, the garden will include native woodland hedgerows, a wildflower meadow, a pond and food production areas. This special new space will be somewhere local people can come together, develop skills, feel better, have fun and find peace and tranquillity in the city.

The local environment benefits, too. This old brownfield site is becoming a thriving ecology garden – a sanctuary for birds, bats, small mammals, and amphibians.