During the London Festival of Architecture and beyond the site of 100 Union Street in SE1 will be transformed into an urban orchard and community garden. Curated by The Architecture Foundation and designed by Heather Ring of the Wayward Plant Registry the orchard will be built with the help of local gardening group, Bankside Open Spaces Trust and an array of other helpful volunteers regenerating a disused site in Bankside and creating a place for exchange between local residents and visitors to the Festival. The garden will also be home to the LivingARK, a zero-carbon pod which will be inhabited during the Festival to showcase sustainable ways of living.
For the South: Bankside Urban Forest focus weekend of the Festival (3-4 July) the Orchard will play host to a number of activities including workshops and discussions about biodiversity and urban food growing, while The Wayward Plant Registry – an organisation that rescues and adopts unwanted plants - will run a plant adoption and exchange programme from the Orchard, encouraging visitors to the Festival to donate plants to the project.
Visitors will also find: The best of new Finnish wood architecture in the form of The Nest, a pavilion created by The Finnish Institute and programmed as part of the Festival’s International Architecture Showcase; A skip converted into a table tennis table by designer Oliver Bishop-Young; The Identikit Urban Playground, a workshop shelter designed to encourage children to interact with their city, by Bartlett student’s Thomas Kendall and Tamsin Hanke for the International Architecture Student Festival and custom-designed bird boxes by 51% being built as part of the Festival activity entitled, Nestworks 1 2 3.
Seasoned LFA visitors may recall that the 100 Union Street site hosted EXYZT's Southwark Lido in 2008.
Photo: Drew Woodhouse