Gardens bursting with energy

At first glance, Brondesbury Park railway station in North East London looks like any ordinary station. It is moderately busy in the evening rush hour, with overground trains picking up passengers every ten minutes. While they wait, many of the commuters scroll around on their phones or leaf through copies of the Evening Standard. Others, however, look around with curiosity: behind a low wall at the edge of the platform, where a few weary passengers have plonked themselves down, salad beds and small fig trees are growing, and hops climb up a wooden trellis at the back. When you take a few steps towards the wall, you can hear the buzzing of bees. Then you spot the large tanks filled with rainwater and the solar panels installed above them. Brondesbury Park is not just a railway station, it’s also an Energy Garden – a little pocket of nature in the middle of the British capital.

The main part of the garden is located at the back of the opposite platform, with a small gate in a low wooden fence providing access for everyone. Beyond the gate, a narrow winding path leads through the grass. On the right are a chair and a makeshift table, cobbled together from wooden pallets, on top of which are a hoe, a gardening fork, and pruning shears. A few steps further, we see Agamemnon Otero working in the waist-high grass. The 44-year-old is dressed in a long-sleeved T-shirt and an orange high-vis jacket as he cuts back blackberry bushes.

Otero is bursting with energy and has a permanent smile on his face. He barely pauses for breath as he talks passionately about the health benefits of certain plants that grow here, about the neighbourhood residents who help out in the garden and grow vegetables, about the busy life of the worker bees – and about how he founded Energy Garden. “Essentially, it was born out of the desire to get people and civil society talking about sustainability,” he summarises.

Otero believes that a metropolis like London, with almost nine million inhabitants, is the perfect place for the initiative. “Every year, more than two billion journeys are made on public transport in this city,” he says. “An average of 6,000 people board, alight, and change trains at each overground station every day, waiting around 14 minutes for their connection.” Most passengers, he adds, spend that time looking at their phones. The platform garden is intended to draw attention away from electronic devices and to the environment, bringing Londoners into direct contact with nature and giving them a quarter of an hour each day to reflect on sustainability and climate change – as well as on where our food comes from. “We have solar panels on the platform, rainwater collection systems, and green areas,” says Otero. “All that encourages reflection and debate.” And that’s not all: passengers are also invited to grab some gardening gloves and get involved themselves.

On this particular evening, about a dozen people drop by Brondesbury Park station garden to help with the work. It is London Climate Action Week, and the Energy Garden team are introducing local residents to their project. “Ten years ago, this entire area was covered with a black plastic tarpaulin,” says 31-year-old botanist Naomi Paine. “The first step was to remove the tarp and let the plants underneath grow.” Today, large parts of the former wasteland have been transformed into a small patch of natural wilderness, covered in shrubs and tall grasses. A bee hive stands at one end of the garden, and during the day bats sleep in the trees. There is even a hedgehog house that has the occasional inhabitant. The next step, Paine says, is to attract a greater variety of wildlife by planting new types of flora: “The more native plant species that grow here, the more pollinators will move into the garden and help increase the biodiversity.”

Paine explains that one of Energy Garden’s main objectives is to get commuters and residents interested in the garden and involved in the work. It was this aspect that attracted Paine herself to the project: “I wanted to work for an organisation that reaches out to and engages with people – people who are otherwise rarely involved in gardening and not all that familiar with topics like biodiversity.” She believes it is important that as many people as possible interact with nature and learn more about their environment. “When you buy your vegetables from the supermarket, you become disconnected from the origins of your food,” adds her colleague Otero. “But when I sow the seeds with my own hands, when I grow the tomatoes myself and then pick them, I have a very close relationship with what I’m eating.”

Everyone is free to choose what they want to do in the garden – and they can plant whatever they like as long as they coordinate with the others. “Everything is freely accessible – the plants, the harvest, the water,” says Otero. “It’s a collaboration between people, a dialogue with the city.” Brondesbury Park is one of the largest Energy Gardens, but there are now almost three dozen of these small oases across London, and more than 100 of the city’s residents regularly participate in the gardening work. “Energy Garden provides initial support for the projects, helping them plan and construct the green spaces and install the solar panels,” says Kyle Baldock, a tall 29-year-old whose role at Energy Garden is to liaise and exchange information with local groups. He started out as a volunteer in 2018 and is now Community Engagement Officer. “It’s important for us to build long-term relationships with local communities so that they can continue to grow,” says Baldock. To foster this spirit of togetherness, it is also very important to Energy Garden that the project has a cooperative structure.

Cooperatives rely on a sense of community. “It’s the opposite of philanthropy, where a rich person says: ‘You’re poor, I’m going to give you something.’ This is a collaboration,” explains Otero. Energy Garden was formed in 2016 as a Community Benefit Society – a type of cooperative that enables interested parties to participate directly in a local project. The first bond offer was launched in 2018. “That year, 200 people joined the cooperative, enabling us to raise 600,000 pounds,” says Baldock proudly. In addition, Energy Garden receives donations from companies, universities, and local authorities.

Otero points out that numerous studies have shown the benefits of jointly managed “commons” – green spaces that are under collective ownership and do not belong to a private individual or organisation. He refers in particular to the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom: “She has shown that collectively managed ecosystems, be they forests or fishing grounds, are the ones that are best cared for.” On the other hand, Otero asserts, if external forces regarded those areas not as commons for the benefit of all but solely as a source of profit, they would exploit the systems and create negative feedback processes – ultimately destroying them.

Around the time that cooperative members were installing the first solar panels, Otero was thinking about how he could raise public awareness about sustainability and biodiversity in the big city while also promoting social interaction. And that was when his idea was born to transform vacant plots of land at London Overground stations into collectively managed gardens.

In its first decade, the Energy Garden project has grown rapidly, and several thousand square metres of land have now been transformed into green spaces. Multiple London authorities support the project financially, and the gardens have welcomed a total of one million visitors – many of whom have been persuaded to get involved, and to join the cooperative.

The hope is that every garden will make a small contribution towards combating the climate and environmental crisis. As is the case at Brondesbury Park, many of the gardens are equipped with solar panels. They provide electricity for use on-site – for example, to power water pumps and to charge batteries. This infrastructure is to be continuously expanded, one garden at a time.

In September 2020, the cooperative launched a new, large-scale community share offer in an effort to raise millions of pounds for the installation of solar panels on the roofs of transport depots. In the first phase, Energy Garden hopes to achieve a maximum output of 400 kilowatts peak (kWp), which should generate enough income to make the cooperative financially independent. This would allow it to create fully paid positions for the volunteers who look after the gardens, for example. The cooperative also wants to use the proceeds to bring individuals, communities, and companies together and ensure that the expertise gained is passed on to the next generation.

It is a rainy Saturday two days after our visit to Brondesbury Park, and we are now in the South London district of Brixton. In an artist’s studio located under the brick arches of the railway line, ten young people stand around a wooden table, each holding a soldering iron. They have been given the task of connecting two solar cells so that electricity can flow from one to the other. To do this, a thin aluminium strip must be soldered to both plates – a job that requires a lot of concentration and dexterity. This is the first time the participants have ever held solar cells, let alone worked with them, and they are having lots of fun.

The workshop forms part of a training programme that Energy Garden offers young Londoners aged 18 to 24, explains the programme’s coordinator, Sian Palmer. In a course lasting several months, participants are introduced to the world of energy cooperatives and the green economy. They learn, for example, how the global electricity market works, why conventional energy generation pollutes the air, what environmental legislation currently exists, and which cooperative financing models are available. There are also modules on biodiversity and gardening. In short, it’s a kind of crash course in sustainability that aims to inspire young people to become active in the sector themselves.

Today, the Energy Garden team are showing participants how solar cells generate electricity and how to con- nect them to build their own solar panels. Alongside Sian Palmer and Agamemnon Otero, technical advisor Ben Phillips is also here. After lunch, he will show the participants how to connect the solar panels to a water pump. “The training programme equips young people with skills that can help them in their jobs and studies, or in projects of their own,” says Palmer. The course is sponsored by an investment firm that supports sustainable companies. At the end of the course, the young adults have the opportunity to gain several months of work experience at wind, solar, biogas, or cleantech energy companies.

Jalil, a charismatic 22-year-old with cornrows who usually works as a musician in East London, has just broken his solar cell. Jalil grew up on the Banister House estate in the borough of Hackney, where he still lives today. When Otero’s Repowering project began installing solar panels on the roofs of the estate around five years ago, Jalil was one of the residents who helped with the installation and became a member of the energy cooperative. Otero told him about this course a few weeks ago – and Jalil was immediately enthusiastic. “Renewable energy is the industry of the future,” he says, explaining that he wants to pursue a second career in the sector alongside his music. “I want to learn everything I can about new ways of generating energy. I’m particularly interested in the financial side; my goal is to make the industry more sustainable and to channel the profits into meaningful projects.”

The course comprises a total of 40 hours, spread over three months. It particularly encourages the participation of young Londoners from minority ethnic backgrounds, some of whom face societal disadvantages in regard to housing, education, and income. The course also helps participants prepare for the job market, teaching them how to write a CV and what to consider in a job interview, for example. “It’s particularly important to us that the participants are paid for the time they invest,” says Sian Palmer. And not just the national minimum wage, she explains, but the London Living Wage of 10.85 pounds per hour. This is intended to guarantee a decent income for all in the expensive English capital.