Can you be involved in local nature from the library?
We sure think you can!
The Thames21 team is working to connect communities to their blue and green spaces in inspiring ways. Here, Lula Wattam, Thames21’s Engagement Officer, highlights her recent successful engagement event in Walthamstow and how she used art to connect communities to nature. She also demonstrates how one doesn’t have to be outdoors to be engaged with nature.
Chestnuts Field – a poem
An empty field, deserted.
Occasional dog walkers, and ephemeral firework displays.
The Plague gave life to the field, the locals finding it for their solitary walks.
Demolition of the court house revealed a bomb, exploded where today there is a lake.
The plain prairie style field now has rushes, flowers, damsel flies where rye grass stood.
A “Slough of Despond” reveals the use of this once deserted place.
Bridget Wilkinson – 2 February 2025
Connecting communities to nature
On a freezing cold Sunday morning in December, I headed down to Chestnut Farms Allotment, which is located on Forest Road in Walthamstow, London. I was crashing the committee meeting to discuss plans for community engagement on plans for new wetlands in the area. It was here that I had the pleasure of meeting Tatiana Rosoga, a local artist who runs a business called High 5 Workshops. We got talking, and it quickly became clear that we shared the same enthusiasm for bringing people together through creativity. She had run previous workshops using watercolour and clay, and I was keen to find ways to get people excited about the site in ways that didn’t just involve getting their boots muddy. A collaboration felt like the natural next step.
Working with Tatiana and Cristian Ciuchita (who also helps to run High 5 Workshops), we ran a ‘Wetland Inspired Clay Tile and Watercolour’ session together. Here participants created beautiful pieces of work, discussed flood defences and sipped tea. The events felt relaxed with the group sharing ideas and encouraging each other overseen by the wonderful tutorage of the artistic duo. One participant remarked: “I really enjoyed the opportunity to feel closer to nature through creativity.”
I also led a ‘Wetland Poetry Walk and Workshop’ solo, which attracted many writers from the Forest Poets group. The conversations we had ranged from the literary symbolism of wetlands and national identity to the geology of peat bogs and the ecological benefits of these landscapes. It was great to see how these themes resonated with people from different backgrounds and experiences, sparking new ways of thinking about urban nature.
What’s the point in drawing a frog? Why write a poem about a bog?
In my previous role, working as an Activity Coordinator with the elderly, I had more experience leading creative writing groups and crafting rather than being waders deep, spotting river fly. My background didn’t involve holding citizen science or river restoration events.. However, to approach the project like this wasn’t a big jump but made a lot of sense considering nature has spurred human creativity for millennium, from the prehistoric cave paintings to the art of the Romantics. Its awe inspiring and curiosity inducing. Creating artwork about the natural world can be a source of comfort and healing for many.
Of course, it is great to get people on site in our projects, on the foreshore, in the rivers. Yet in the depths of winter not everyone enjoys trampling around in the sludge – and let’s be honest it’s not appealing to many over the summer period either! This doesn’t mean these people should be excluded from their natural environment, it just means they can be engaged in different ways. It’s important to expand our events indoors sometimes.
That’s why we were lucky to secure a space at Walthamstow Library for our creative workshops. Libraries are one of the few truly public, free and accessible community spaces left, and Walthamstow Library is a perfect example of that. It’s always buzzing with kids’ groups, reading clubs, even transforming into temporary NHS clinic, housing advice drop in and sometimes just a warm space. If you want to find a true cross-section of the community, a library is where they are. It made sense to run our sessions in a space like this, where people already feel welcome and confident.
Improvement
New science for our lapses
Set up anxious fences
Cranes below cranes
The use of the useless
Quixotic unproductiveness
To set up new reports
Even liminality circumscribed
For I wish
For sirens hums noises
To end with
Croaks squawks calls
Cycles of it all
Carbon water air plans
Nature just used to reuse
We to manage and define
Rain-melted concrete
Mikolaj Halber
Barriers to Participating in Green Blue Spaces
Not everyone can or wants to engage with local green spaces in the same way. Some love to get muddy planting trees or litter picking the foreshore. Others prefer to connect to nature through poetry, sculpture, painting and drawing. Both are equally valid and important ways of engaging with blue/ green environments. Creative workshops can offer sometimes, an easier and more accessible point into this relationship, especially for those who struggle with mobility or simply don’t like to be outdoors in extreme conditions. When designing holistic projects to ensure widespread engagement particularly of “hard to reach” groups – making space for both kinds of groups is essential.
Engaging with the natural environment isn’t always a given, it’s in many ways a privilege. Historically and currently, barriers to access to nature can be shaped by ability, race and class. The countryside and space of conservation are often exclusionary, whether it’s through historical land ownership structures of some traditional institutions, including roots in colonial violence – or the way certain outdoor activities and spaces are physically designed with only abled-bodied participants in mind.
Charlie N, writing for London Wildlife Trust during Black History Month, put it well:
“The power of land management and place building is still held by organisations that don’t actually have roots in our underserved communities.”
The same applies to disabled people’s access to nature. Conservation movements have historically been built around an able-bodied, physically active idea of engagement—one that assumes true environmental connection means hiking, climbing, swimming, or manual conservation work. But what about those who are excluded in experiencing nature in those ways? If we truly want our work to be intersectional and representative of local communities, we must make space for different ways of engaging.
Did it work?
In terms of reaching wider audiences the creative sessions were successful. It’s well known volunteers in the environment sector can be predominately abled bodied, wealthy and white. In the participants base for the creative sessions, those who identified as having a disability was 29%; higher than the borough average of 17% (London Borough of Waltham Forest, 2024). With 33% of individuals identifying as being from non-white background. In comparison, solely outdoor events I have run on-site have seen no participation from individuals identifying as non-white. It’s really about making everybody feel welcome.
Although the activities were not solely focused on, but inspired by, Chestnuts Field Wetland, participant feedback showed strong educational impact. When asked to rate their learning about sustainable drainage systems and the wetland’s benefits to the local area (on a scale of 1 to 5), participants gave an average score of 4.8. This demonstrates that funding and project requirements for education and knowledge sharing can be met without physically interacting with the wetland, pulling up reed beds.
So should we start crocheting in waders on the marginal zone of the Dagenham Brook?
Not necessarily! But creating different entry points into local green blue spaces is a great way to become more inclusive whether its measuring pollution or through music and storytelling. It’s also important to stress these different kinds of activities aren’t mutually exclusive, many enjoy and can learn to enjoy both. Someone who comes to build a frog out of clay, could eventually end up at a litter pick, and vice versa. But making sure that initial engagement is accessible first is important to build confidence and trust with those who might not be keen to get on site initially.
It’s not about replacing and overhauling traditional conservation engagement efforts, it’s about expanding them. The more diverse the ways we invite people in, the more diverse our volunteer/ participant base will be resulting in stronger and more sustainable communities local to the projects we work on. And, as I mentioned before, it’s about welcoming everybody and getting rid of the “intimidatory factor”.
Creative engagement isn’t just an addition to conservation work but a crucial part of making sure everyone feels they have a place in nature. If we want true environmental connection, we need to rethink what that looks like. Sometimes, it’s about being waist-deep in a river. Other times, about sitting in a warm room, painting a crane or drawing a mouse swimming. Both are important!
Please look out for community events like these on our ‘What’s On’ page to register for more events like this here:https://www.thames21.org.uk/events/
All are welcome!
Sources:
Disability | London Borough of Waltham Forest
Conservation, Eco-Ableism, and Reclaiming Limitations – Sempervirens Fund
Colonialism and historic slavery report | National Trust