At Cranbrook Community Food Garden

Click here to book for my tour through July, August & September . . Laura Buckley Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I were delighted to shelter under a tree and share a cuppa with Head Gardener Laura Buckley at the Cranbrook Community Food Garden in Bethnal Green during a recent downpour. Surrounded on all sides by the modernist towers of the Cranbrook Estate designed by Francis Skinner, Douglas Bailey & Berthold Lubetkin in 1963, the Garden is an unlikely and welcome enclave of rural greenery where residents grow vegetables, fruit and flowers, and cultivate community. Laura was one of the pioneers of the garden and we delighted to hear of its origins seventeen years ago, and learn of her love of horticulture which took root in her childhood in the fifties in Watney Market. ‘I have lived on the Cranbrook Estate for thirty years but at first I did not have much involvement, I live on the outskirts, in one of the blocks facing out onto the main road. Then, one day, I was…