Quiet Gardens, Uneven Access -AAGarden Short Case in The Big Issue

AAGarden was featured in a short case published by The Big Issue, as part of a wider reflection on community gardens, access, and care within the frame of Critical Hope.

The project was developed in collaboration with London Arts and Health, The Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance, and Arts & Homelessness International, bringing together voices from across the field of creative health, and contributing to a special Big Issue edition titled Critical Hope.

In Paulo Freire’s work, hope is not optimism, but a grounded and active practice

resisting oppression while continuing to imagine transformation.

“Critical hope” describes a way of understanding the present through equity and justice, while still holding space for the possibility of a different future.

Within this frame, AAGarden appears as a short case exploring how community gardens are used, overlooked, or partially inaccessible, and how creative health practices might respond.

Over the past year, AAGarden has developed as an ongoing practice rooted in Social & Therapeutic Horticulture. Through gardening, the project explores how wellbeing is shaped by everyday life, spatial conditions, and access to community resources—particularly among newcomers in the UK, including migrants, international students, and non-native English-speaking residents.

A recurring question has shaped this work: why do community gardens often feel quiet?

Community gardens are often framed as visible symbols of sustainability and wellbeing. Yet there is often a gap between visibility and participation. Rather than treating this as a lack of engagement, this work returns to the conditions that shape presence, absence, and partial participation.

Creative health offers a key lens here: health is not only experienced within society, but shaped by the conditions society produces.

For many newcomers, access is not only about resources, but about everyday infrastructures of visibility and relation - how information is made visible, how spaces are entered, how informal relationships form, and how language and institutions shape navigation.

Rather than treating the garden as a service or intervention, AAGarden works with it as a low-threshold relational space. Here, care, belonging, and wellbeing are not fixed outcomes, but something continuously formed through encounters with land, plants, and shared environments.

Within this practice, we developed a simple interactive element. Participants connect with plants through small digital gestures. These gestures are intentionally minimal, functioning less as tools and more as traces—small marks of attention that remain over time.

A participant connects with a plant through a simple digital interaction. These actions are recorded and can be revisited later.

What remains is a light continuity between presence, memory, and care.

These explorations remain open-ended. They return to a set of ongoing questions: how might care, presence, and participation be sustained through everyday and digital forms of relation? What kinds of continuity are possible within low-intensity, informal interactions? And how might these small relational shifts reshape how we understand creative health in practice?

Grab a copy from your local vendor this week and have a read. https://www.bigissueshop.com/