Looking back at 2024 and looking ahead at 2025

I wake to a bright crisp winter’s day. Finally … after weeks of storms ravaging the country. 

As the year ends we are reminded of the magic and beauty that our gardens bring, as places to come together and celebrate, even in difficult times. This year it has been challenging not to be taken over by fear and despair, with extreme weather events being mirrored in different ways across the world, from floods to droughts; with the most recent political events; with wars destroying land and displacing entire populations; and with the constant increase in the cost of living creating ever more inequalities between those that have and those that do not.

2024 has also brought us loss within the Global Generation family, with the passing away of Siw Thomas, our friend, Global Generation facilitator, artist, and gardener. And of Raymi Saldaña Rojas, a gentle, committed and talented young person on our youth leadership programme, the Generators and member of our Youth Circle. We are still grieving these losses, making space for this whilst also making space to celebrate their lives and recognise that their presence lives on in everything we see and touch in the gardens.

Let us not look for you only in memory,
Where we would grow lonely without you.
You would want us to find you in presence,
Beside us when beauty brightens,
When kindness glows
And music echoes eternal tones.
- John O'Donohue

Whilst we have been making space for us to acknowledge our grief, as a team and with the young people we work with, we also put our efforts on finding ways to share and connect with each other and build collective resilience and community in these uncertain times.  We know that now more than ever, we have to awaken the fire in our bellies, to practice gratitude for being alive and being able to act. We are inspired by Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ ‘Letter To A Young Activist During Troubled Times’ in which she says:

"Do not lose heart. We were made for these times... In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that… One of the most important steps you can take to help calm the storm is to not allow yourself to be taken in a flurry of overwrought emotion or desperation thereby accidentally contributing to the swale and the swirl…Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach".

And so, we also end the year with gratitude in our hearts and focus on what is within our reach, on what we are able to do as a community of people in our gardens and beyond. When we have our hands in the soil; when we bring people together to find common ground through the sharing of values and stories; when we listen to what the land is telling us and act from that space; when we tune into the curiosity, the innate sense of wonder for the natural world, the deep caring and the sense of agency that children and young people develop in the time they spend with us; there is much reason to hope for the future.

Here are some ways that we have been connecting people with each other and with the more than human world this year to create a more just and life sustaining world:

Bringing people together to celebrate 

2024 marked 20 years of Global Generation and we used that as a moment to celebrate the incredible legacy that we have had so far. This happened in our community and solstice events throughout the year but also in special milestone fundraising and celebratory events like: a Community Sauna Pop Up, 5th Birthday, Skip to Brick Music Festival and Youth Winter Market & Winter Solstice at Story Garden; Community Build days at Triangle site; Voices of the Water Exhibition at Floating Garden; and Summer Supper Club Series and Winter Community Celebration at Paper Garden.

We reached out to people who have been involved in the shaping of Global Generation’s journey over the past 2 decades for the story to be told through different perspectives, and have compiled these into a blog series, a film and a zine.

2024 has also been a year of awards for Global Generation across our sites. We won various awards for the Paper Garden in partnership with friend and collaborator Jan Kattein: two New London Architecture (NLA) Awards - the meanwhile category and the environment special prize, we are a regional finalist in the Civic Trust Awards, and a finalist in the Thornton Education Trust Inspire Future Generation Award; we won the Property Awards best social impact initiative for the Floating Garden; Raymi has won the Youth Camden Award for his contributions as a young person in Camden through his involvement with Global Generation, and Silvia Pedretti has won the Youth Camden Practitioner’s Award for her inspirational, creative and committed work with young people at Story Garden.

Developing gardens for people, plants and animals to thrive

Paper Garden

The team at the Paper Garden have been working across programmes this year with children from local schools, with young people on the Generators and with local families, engaging over 2000, to explore the role of often overlooked ecologies through creative investigation in the garden and in the kitchen. They have been unearthing the bacteria, bugs and fungus that keeps our bodies functioning, upholds our food systems and creates the basis for all living things on our planet. The year ended with a big community celebration which put at its heart the weird and wonderful life in our bodies and in our soils and displayed the young people's work from across our programmes.

The Paper Garden has grown this year with the input of many hands. The regular primary schools groups, holiday clubs with Time and Talents, and Roots and Shoots students have all collaboratively sowed seeds, harvested, and dined on the produce. New perennial plants have been given homes in the soil and we are all excited by the successful use of our Big Pig composters to support that crucial soil life in the garden on top of the concrete slab. Alongside this garden development we have been running Food Growing in the Curriculum and Co Building trainings in the Big Jarrah classroom. 

The team and young people have worked on the growth of a local garden with organisation Restorative Justice for All, continuing the supportive role of Global Generation within the greening plans of local estates. We have begun the process of guiding the Brunel Museum with their Heritage Lottery Bid, which begins with family gardening workshops run by Global Generation and in a few years will include the creation of a new garden space. In October three Generators read a beautiful poem as they opened the new red bridge over Canada Water Dockland, spreading the voices of the water across the audience. Meanwhile, the gardens at Redriff, Albion and St Johns primary schools are flourishing, and we are looking forward to deepening our work in the schools as the years continue and the importance of outdoor education comes further embedded into school wellbeing practices. 

Story Garden and Somers Town greening

As we enter our last year of being at Story Garden, the garden has welcomed 7000 people through our community events and programmes with some highlights including our Generator Youth Leadership Programme, Family Saturdays, Introduction to Horticulture courses, Gardening Club, Harington Scheme work experience placements, Cooking and Craft, and school visits, including Nature Connect days for new Young Ambassadors in partnership with Bertha Earth.

In the garden, we have been putting in place more low maintenance and wildlife gardening, such as the introduction of more perennial crops, including Taunton Deane Kale, intercropping, leaving crops to flower and seed, and keeping some areas wild, as our focus is now shared between the Story Garden and building our new permanent site. The community growers, 75 local residents living in Somers Town, have once again grown impressive produce this summer, including bottle gourds, lab lab beans, chillies, aubergines and amaranth; and our participants across programmes have loved learning about the bees in our beehive, in partnership with Alveole.  

Beyond the borders of the Story Garden, we have continued to support local residents in Somers Town with greening on their estates as part of the Future Neighbourhoods project in partnership with other local organisations. As part of this we have recruited 2 local Green Mentors and are upskilling local people in horticulture skills through training and support.

Floating Garden

The Floating Garden, our barge on the Regents Canal, has really come to life this year, now in its second year. The barge was at the heart of our National Lottery Heritage programme - Voices of the Water - in which young and older participants uncovered, celebrated and shared their personal and cultural memories and experiences of water, mythological stories of water and the role of water in our climate changing world, culminating in a big summer solstice celebration and exhibition on the barge.  

The Floating Garden also continues to be the main base for our older group of Generators, inspiring them to think about nature and sustainability in the built environment. Other highlights included holding kitchen medicine workshops in the space, being part of Canal Dream Art Festival, welcoming other local community organisations, such as the Stuart Low Trust and the Arachne Greek Cypriot Women’s Group, and planting and launching a Biomatrix Floating Island at the rear of the barge with our fortnightly Twilight Gardening Club, which had nesting ducks in the spring and has provided much needed habitat for coots and moorhens along the canal. 

Partnerships

To celebrate our story to date and our achievements over the last 20 years, we rekindled old connections and created new collaborations and partnerships. From our start, Global Generation has worked on the edges - collaborating with businesses and local authorities to bring them together with local young people and residents to share experiences and find common ground. 

Over our 20 years, we have found that creativity, abundance and diversity of thought and possibility flourishes when people from different backgrounds, ages and sectors come together as a force for change. It’s where new ideas emerge and possibilities are born. Our 20 year’s Anniversary Celebration Event hosted at Rotunda in Kings Cross reminded us of the many hands that have helped to shape our gardens over the years, through financial support, cross sector collaborations and moments of shared learning and reflection. The event also shaped the way for new friendships to evolve as we co-create our first permanent home. The event - a first of its kind for Global Generation- raised over £23,000 and has provided us with a model for hosting more of these types of events. 

Building a new garden for generations to come

After 20 years of co-creating gardens on temporary land, moving every few years, this year we signed a 999 year lease and started the build of a permanent garden in summer 2024. It is amazing to be implementing all the learnings from the past years and run a truly collaborative community build. The build is being run through community build days, Twilight Gardening evenings, school workshops and a trainee programme for young people in natural build techniques and heritage crafts. These include building with cob, green woodworking, creating handmade wooden shingles and bricks, and basketry making.

Looking ahead at 2025

When we come back in January, we enter our winter period of reflecting and planning for the year to come and look forward to all that 2025 will bring. It will be another big year for Global Generation, with a busy spring and summer in King’s Cross as we make the most of our last year at Story Garden and involvement with the British Library’s Gardening Exhibition; the move of the Story Garden to our new permanent site; the continued development of the work in Somers Town, supporting local residents with greening their spaces and neighbourhood; the refurbishment of the classroom in the Floating Garden; and cross-partnership working with schools and local community organisations in Paper Garden.

We thank all the people who spend time in our gardens and our partners who support us in creating spaces for both people and plants to thrive.

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Notes from the Garden