We finally agreed on a subject: “The marginalisation of green spaces”. The question now is to understand if we want to focus on the green spaces in the world, or more precisely in the UK, or even London? There are local organisations like Woodland trust or international ones like Stand for trees that we could contact to help them spread the word on the work they are already doing…
Or we could also look around us… Next to our school, we discovered a beautiful little Japanese Garden the other day… What is it doing there? Where does it come from? Is there a local community that takes care of it?
After searching online, we found an association called “The Friends of Hammersmith Park” that was led by John Gordon-Smith and contacted him for a meeting.
John has been incredibly nice, always getting back to us quickly and available for any question we might have or information we might need.
When we asked him about his wish for this garden, he said: “I want people to rediscover this lost garden”. According to him, most people in the neighbourhood do not know it exists. And from those who know about it, very few of them know about its history. It is indeed the only remaining site of the historical Japan-British Exhibition that took place in 1910. He would like to get more people to enjoy and use the space informally.
Some ideas we are having for the project:
Collect stories from the friends of the park
QR code on the trees containing the stories
Audio tour
Instagram treasure hunt
Launch event
Webpage
The digital is just to amplify the physical
John was kind enough to leave us some posters and printed information he has been collecting in the past years:
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