Tynemouth Road Health Centre: Nature Play Garden, Tottenham

This community garden at Tynemouth Road Health Centre in Tottenham transforms a large, unused lawn into a nature play garden where foraging, exploration, and imaginative play take centre stage. Guided by a food forestry ethos, large logs and boulders are scattered throughout the garden, inviting children to climb, scramble, and engage with the landscape in a genuinely hands-on way.

Two shelters anchor the garden design, creating dedicated areas for staff breaks and one-to-one therapies, connecting the space to its wider health and wellbeing purpose, just minutes from Markfield Community Garden. Inside, chalkboards burst with colour and creativity, becoming living artworks that grow and evolve alongside the children who use them.

This was a fully zero-waste project. Excavated materials were repurposed along the building perimeter to create a nature trail with contoured earth, rubble, and logs - seeded and whip-planted to establish a rich wildlife habitat. A feature crush corridor in the main garden celebrates the magic of reuse, turning site waste into opportunities for play and ecological value.

The result is a garden where wildness, learning, and creativity thrive together. A space that staff and children have made entirely their own.