Newham Voices - April 2024: Abbey Gardens

 

Just finished reading the latest from our community newspaper "Newham Voices". To mark Community Garden Week they feature West Ham (not Stratford!!!) Abbey Gardens. Apart from this geographical error - a good read. 

West Ham Ward Councillor Surgery Saturday 6 June 10am to 11am

My next Newham London, West Ham ward, virtual Councillor surgery is tomorrow (Saturday 6 June) from 10am to 11am. Please email John.Gray@Newham.Gov.uk and I will contact your by phone, or by Zoom, or by Skype or by GoToMeeting or by Teams. 

You can always contact me via email outside this time and I will get back to you as soon as I can. 

Picture above is of one of my West Ham Councillor predecessors, Ben Cunningham and the "Plaistow Land-grabbers"  https://www.johnslabourblog.org/2010/06/what-will-harvest-be-abbey-gardens-fair.html

Abbey Gardens: The Herb Festival 14 September 2019 12-4pm

"Come along to our Herb Festival on 14 Sept, from 12 noon - 4pm. Workshops, live music, face painting, teas and food. Entry and workshops free, food and drinks for donations"

Abbey Gardens E15 - Harvest Festival & Classic Vegetable Show

CELEBRATE What will the Harvest be?

Saturday 17th September 2pm-5pm A FREE EVENT FOR ALL AGES

Dear Friend, Friends of Abbey Gardens will be holding our Harvest Festival on Saturday 17th September. It's a free event for all ages. We invite you to celebrate and taste the harvest, enjoy the garden at its best and celebrate the 10th anniversary year since Friends of Abbey Gardens was formed. Highlights include: Talk by Karen Guthrie, House of Ferment: Preserving What’s Fresh Now for Later.  Enjoy cookery tastings and demonstration Enter your best veg in our classic show for the chance to win a prize! Kids craft, lucky dips and bric-a-brac stall Plentiful produce from the garden on our Honesty Stall Visit our ever-popular tea and cake stall We hope to see you at the event. Vicki Lewis admin@abbeygardens.org PS  Don't forget our usual drop-in gardening sessions are running three times a week until the end of October.

Abbey Gardens Winter Fair - Saturday 6 December 2014

"Dear friends,

Winter is fast approaching and so is the end of the gardening season 2014.

At Abbey Gardens we are busy harvesting parsnips, celeriac, chard and leeks and having a good shed clear-out.

The last event of this season will be our Winter Fair on
Saturday 6 December, 4 pm-6pm

Visit the garden in Winter and celebrate the season with us. There will be:

· Warming winter drinks
· Soup made from Abbey Gardens’ produce
· Christmas carol sing-along lead by members of Regent Community Brass Band
· Cards and garden goodies on our honesty stall
· Lots of fairy lights
· And our ever-popular cake stall

Free entry. Drinks, food and honesty stall produce for donations to the garden.

It will be nice to see you in the garden, come and join us for some festive fun.

For a perfect ending to your day, why not continue on to All Saints Chorus and Orchestra's 20th anniversary concert. They will be performing Bach's Christmas Oratorio at West Ham Parish Church (All Saints), Church Street, E15 3HU. The concert starts at 6.30 p.m. Tickets are available on the door and are priced at £15, concessions £10.

And if you are keen to soak up some early Christmas atmosphere come and see us at The Printhouse Christmas Market on Saturday 22 November. The Printhouse is located at 133 High Street, Stratford, E15 2RB.

Thank you for all your support this year.

Friends of Abbey Gardens"

From our events team
Publicity graphics kindly donated by Catherine French

Abbey Gardens Summer Party - Saturday 14 June, 1-4pm

This is a late post for a fantastic West Ham ward Community Garden event.

Abbey Gardens Frost Fair Saturday 7 December 2013

"Dear friends,

Thank you to all of you who helped make this season another milestone year for Abbey Gardens. 

We registered as a Charity in January, ran over 100 free gardening sessions, attracted over 200 people to our Summer event and Harvest Festival, secured additional funding to built a composting toilet, a cooking area.. 

Our gardening sessions ended last Saturday to a bumper crop of sweet potatoes, which sealed a year of amazing harvest...

But the season would not be complete without our Frost Fair on December 7th from 4 - 6pm.

The event is free, so come out, enjoy warm Winter drinks and home made soups and sing along with members of All Saints Chorus.  There will be a wreath making workshop, chutney tasting and of course, our ever-popular cake stall.

Attached is the event flyer - please feel free to share with others.

I look forward to seeing you on Saturday 7th !"

(hat tip email from Friends of Abbey Garden which is in West Ham ward, Newham, London)

Signs of our times on the West Ham doorstep

On Saturday morning I went door knocking in my ward with local West Ham Labour branch comrades (and Council candidates in 2014) Julianne Marriot and John Whitworth. Julianne had been up early that day to be interviewed by various BBC channels in her role as a supporter of "Don't Judge my Family" campaign against Tory plans to penalise families who don't want to be told that they have to get "married" - or else.

She was pretty talked out and was facing more interviews later that day so she did the paperwork and the two John's did most of the door knocking and the talking.

I said hello to members of the Abbey Gardens Community Garden who were setting up their "Food Glorious Food Festival" for that afternoon. I gave my apologies for not being able to attend due to another commitment but my colleague Cllr Freda Bourne did attend.

Anti-social behaviour was a key theme of this street surgery. Residents were pleased that the local Metropolitan Police Safer Neighbourhood team were moving to nearby Newham Council Abbey Road depot. I am still more than a little fed up with London Mayor, Boris Johnson's failure to live up to his manifesto promises to keep up Police numbers in London. He has tried to hide this reduction in numbers by merging our local safer neighbourhood teams. But everyone needs to know that due to Boris there is less Police out on our streets to look after us.

An interesting sign of our times was that I knocked on one door and spoke to a resident who told me she had a complaint about our council bulk rubbish service. She went and got her IPAD and showed me within seconds a record she had made of a long list of people she had spoken to (and times) at the  Council arrange collection of her bulk rubbish, which for whatever reason never happened. She agreed to send me this information so I can try and find out what had went wrong.  I was surprised since the bulk rubbish service in Newham is my experience pretty good and I get few complaints and many compliments.  

I knocked on another door and a resident who I have never met before spoke to me about an email he had sent to me recently. I apologised that I hadn't yet seen that email but he said that he understood since he followed me on Facebook and knew I had been busy and away last week at Labour Party conference!

My best "door knock" of the day was speaking to a resident who so pleased that I had called at his home to speak to him that when I got home, I saw he had emailed me to thank me even though we had a somewhat difficult conversation about what I could (and could not) do about his rehousing application. He and his family lived in a overcrowded and small flat.

What I really liked is when I next knocked on the door of one of his neighbours, an elderly and  fragile man answered the door, looked at me in surprise and said he had only opened the door because he thought it was that same neighbour checking up on him that he was ok, because his wife had recently gone into a nursing home.

So the lesson is some things in the East End do change, but other things don't. We have IPADs, email and Facebook but as long as we still have neighbours looking out after neighbours, one of the really important East End values will live on.

(picture of Abbey Gardens festival with Freda judging) 

West Ham Ward Cable Car Beano

Off message a little but just to prove that not all Labour Party events take place in dusty meeting rooms or involve knocking on doors with clip boards. 

We normally hold our Party ward (or branch) meetings the first Thursday of the month. This month we decided to hold a summer social event instead and take the Emirates Cable Car which goes across the river Thames to Greenwich. 

We met at the new Abbey Road Docklands Light Railway station which is just outside our ward.  While waiting for others to join us, we had a quick tour of the nearby magnificent Abbey Gardens. 

By 7pm 10 of us had turned up (including comrades from Plaistow North ward). I was stopped on the station platform by 2 tourists who asked me where "The Beatles" Zebra crossing was? I had to tell them that they were at the wrong Abbey Road and the one they want is near St Johns Wood station. This is quite a common mistake here. I was also once stopped by an American tourist at Stratford station who asked which way was it to "Shakespeare house"?

The nearest station for the cable car was Royal Victoria. The Dock and the Cable station was extremely impressive. Only £3.20 one way. Cabins normally took 10 people but it was a bit windy so we were restricted to 6. There was no queue and you just walked onto the cabin. 

I have never been on this ride before. Our oldest ward member 84 year old Gerry had never been in a cable car before in his life! The view during the journey over Newham and East London was superb. Visibility was excellent. At Greenwich we had a few drinks, missed the last Cable Car back (9pm) then took a train on the Jubilee line to Stratford, then off to the Jamie Oliver Restaurant at Westfield shopping centre for a late meal and lots of hot air putting the world to rights. It was a good evening.  

Abbey Gardens Vintage Summer Party - Sat 8 June 2013 2-5pm

A fantastic community garden project in West Ham ward, Newham holds its annual summer Party.

Ham Park Village Residents & Make the Space a Place

This report is from what I thought was a pretty successful and constructive meeting tonight of Ham Park Village Residents Association at the Vicarage Lane Community Centre, E15.

Things in life never run that smoothly. There was two last minute scares about the meeting. Firstly, the centre thought it had been cancelled (it hadn't) then we were locked out since there was a problem with the key to open the centre but that was soon sorted out.

There were about 30 local residents present. Ham Park Village is to the west of the historic 1874 West Ham Park, which is the largest public park in Newham and run by a Charitable Trust funded by the City of London. There was a representative from the Park, the local Police Safer Neighbourhood Team (SNT) Sergeant and Newham Council officers, as well as my West Ham ward colleague, Cllr Ron Manley.

 

The first part of the meeting dealt with local Policing issues in our ward, the Park and the Ham Village area. The SNT reported that the ward was 11th out of the 20 Newham wards in terms of crime reports and had average reports of Anti-Social Behaviour (ASB). Despite being "average" there are a number of problems in the ward which impact on residents lives. Street drinkers, low level drug taking, prostitution and violence amongst young people. However, other statistics tell us that while there is problems it is still an area people like and want to stay and live.

 

There was some fiery questions to the Police and the West Ham Park representative but it was on the whole measured and reasoned yet at times passionate. There was a sort of general  agreement (apart from Park benches) at the end of this discussion and also a commitment to better tackle seasonable drink related ASB. 

 

The second part of the meeting was an excellent update and presentation by Newham Council officers. Firstly, on the proposed gates in (a small part) Aileen Walk which has gone out to public consultation. The money has been agreed and providing that the consultation is successful, it should go ahead!

 

Then the age old and controversial issue of "The Wall". Now, this is a low level wall in an unused green space in the village area which nobody quite knows why or when it was built. It serves no useful purpose and there is very significant amounts of ASB reported around "The Wall". The Council housing department own the land and while they have no current plans for it's use are prepared to lease it out to a Community Garden project. They may well want it back in the future to build on but have no plans at this moment and are willing to let it be used for a good purpose in the meanwhile.

 

So this plan is to encourage local residents to take responsibility for the area, get grants and permissions, then knock down the wall and build a Community Garden. To grow fruit, veg and roses. Very like the existing Newham Abbey Gardens and First Avenue Community Garden model. The presentation by various Council officers was very good and the idea was well received. Obviously there was issues and concerns raised but the overwhelming response was positive. We are hopefully at last doing something about "The Wall" and bringing together the local community.

 

This was a great meeting, I enjoyed it and learnt a lot as well. Many thanks to all involved. A Community Garden planning meeting will be held very soon. If anyone local wants to get involved they can email me for contact details of the Ham Village RA.

 

I did twitter during the meeting on hashtag #westhamlbn.

Abbey Gardens Harvest Festival Sat 22 Sept 2-5pm

 

Abbey Gardens Summer Fair - Saturday 9 June 2-5pm

On Saturday 9 June there will be the Abbey Gardens Summer Fair in  Bakers Row, West Ham, E15 3NF. Abbey Gardens is a fantastic community garden project in West Ham Ward on the site of a 12th Century Abbey.

Wild about Spring: Abbey Gardens

This "Wild about Spring" event will take place on Saturday 14 April 2-5pm at Abbey Gardens, Bakers Row, West Ham, E15 3NF. Abbey Gardens is a fantastic community garden project in West Ham Ward on the site of a 12th Century Abbey.