Markfield Park: Community Garden Design, Tottenham

Some gardens start from scratch. This one started from ruins.

Markfield Community Garden in Tottenham is the living legacy of our Chelsea Flower Show 2023 garden — a project rooted in concrete, history, and the quiet power of reclamation. Set within the skeletal remains of one of Britain's first sewage works filtration beds, this is a site where industry hasn't been erased. It's been reimagined.

The bones of the place are still visible. Towering concrete walls. The presence of the original beam engine. Fragments of a post-industrial past that most would have cleared away. Here, they become the foundation of something wilder and more honest — a garden design where food forestry collides with rubble gardening, and structure gives way to genuine wildness.

This is experimental ground. Part testing site, part classroom, part sanctuary. Local schools and the wider community use the space to learn, explore, and reconnect with nature in the middle of the city. Once written off as an anti-social hotspot, Markfield has been reclaimed and reworked into something alive and generous — a landscape shaped by many hands, many cultures, and many stories.

Grown and tended by Steve Williams, the Wild City Studio crew, and a committed network of local volunteers, this garden is proof that the most unlikely spaces can become the most vital ones.