Nomadic Community Gardens
Nomadic Community Gardens (NCG) is a not for profit organisation based in Shoreditch, East London. We are dedicated to transforming disused spaces into urban gardens where people can grow their own produce, create art, share skills, and discover what it means to build their own community from the bottom up.
Our goal is to build “third places” ( home and work being the first and second) that serve as vital points of social interaction and community building. These spaces are important not only for biodiversity, but social and cultural diversity as well. By creating mobile vegetables beds, modular furniture, and transportable art pieces, we are able to transfer both the structures and the ethos of the garden to vacant sites around the city.
Our goal is to build “third places” ( home and work being the first and second) that serve as vital points of social interaction and community building. These spaces are important not only for biodiversity, but social and cultural diversity as well. By creating mobile vegetables beds, modular furniture, and transportable art pieces, we are able to transfer both the structures and the ethos of the garden to vacant sites around the city.
The Spirit of the SpaceWe breath life into disused parts of the city that become places where nature and community thrive. We transform these spaces into urban oasis’ that produce food and where people can learn and grow
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Growing your own and being a part of these kinds of spaces benefits people in so many ways. What matters most is quality of life and part of the frustration, alienation and powerlessness so commonly felt, especially in cities, can be attributed to our relationships; relationships to our environment and each other. A community garden is just the sort of place where these symptoms of the current, modern human condition are alleviated if not reversed. Not only is it good for your health- it gets you outdoors in the sunshine and the work is physical but what you reap is nutritious. It's good for your wealth as growing your own is akin to printing your own money. And you learn or re-learn what is fundamentally a universal language, of food growth. It's empowering to watch your efforts grow and then there's the social side, where we are able to re-establish local support networks, rely on our neighbours and co-create a space that we share a responsibility for.
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Each garden will be different in character and operation depending on the size of the site and the wills and wants of the people using it. We want each space to grow organically from the interaction and relationships it is based upon. We hope eventually people will hear our story and be inspired to do something similar for themselves where we only need supply them (if that) with a replicable model to get their gardens started. We hope growing a vegetable will be a catalyst for the systemic change humanity so clearly needs. Let's start from the ground up, at the grassroots, with dirt under our fingernails, where we have always started and re-gain what we have dearly lost- our connection to the land, each other and the intimate knowledge that allows them to commune harmoniously with one another.