THE GARDEN THAT NOBODY TOLD YOU ABOUT

 
It is spring, March 26th, 2009. At Memory Gardens Autistic Project we have just dug up plants, emptied out tools and art materials from the store-room and distributed them as best we can to other community projects in the neighbourhood. There has been a slow trail of people coming and going all day long with beat up cars, wheelbarrows or simply their own bodies to carry things away with.

Where are we situated on this practical work-day in March? We are situated just off Legard Road, in Highbiry and Islington, North London. To find us you must get past the metal gates leading into the now disused NCH family Unit. You must then pick your way through an array of loose bricks and building materials where the wall between NCH, now “Action for Children” and legard Works has been dismantled. There is moss that furs up the tarmac. Action for Children are negotiating the sale of a larger area that includes and does not discriminate our small garden project with the buildings, car-parks, fields, formal gardens and disused tennis courts that make up the proposed area of new development. So much does the planning brief not discriminate one use from another and tend to run the whole area together as one as if it were already a building site that we are not even mentioned though strangely, the disused tennis courts are.

It has been ten years since I first arrived at what is now an autistic and community sculpture project. Then, not only moss but brambles grew abundantly between the tarmac that the force of its growth tore up in what is now the front lawn of the garden. Bricks were unearthed until they formed a kind of Berlin wall possibly from a building bombed in the war which collapsed onto itself as each floor gave way to the next like a deck of cards. Not having the means to move the bricks we used them; in pathways, flower beds and the many sculptures that came and went creating a soundless web between people who by choice or necessity, preferred to do and not say.

I said before that you would have trouble finding the project. Yet on the days when we ran the adult sculpture club or the youth and mentoring club you would, if you’d passed down Legard Rd, seen our sign “Memory Gardens” with a green peacock inscribed underneath by an autistic adult. And if you’d found out about our club through City and Islington college, through autistic publications or in the notices we put up in nearby community venues, you’d have had a map, had a phone no., had an email contact and might have made your way to the quiet and out of the way garden.

Perhaps you did. In the garden you1d have sat down, been offered tea by a one of the members and begun to walk around in your own time or to involve yourself in the poject underway. That might be tending vegetables, making a joint sculpture, making a joint painting on calico cloth, painting tiles to stick on the walls, creating a mobile out of wore and beads to hang in the trees. Occasionally we would hld barbecues- cook kebabs or stir fry wit some of our grown vegetables.

We were never large producers. We didn’t grow to sell. We didn’t claim to teach gardening or to follow individual learning plans of self-development or self-improvement. What we did do was to hold together a shared space; look after it and in a sense create an unlikely sense of community in the process- between autistic members, carers, parents, people from Legard works next door where their beautiful café became an important focus and extension for some of our members whilst they also extended into some of our projects and activities. Familiarity grew up slowly that also came to include local people who had heard about us and felt like joining in.

I have not wanted to linger in this open letter as to the reasons why we were never recognised by NCH as a resource worth addressing. Why they seemed uncomfortable about our way of doing things as a gradual knowledge base that unfolds from one point of contact to the next through practical participation; where involvement builds; Where community spaces must involve active and multiple uses that change over time s people do. There are so many run down playgrounds, parks and community spaces because facilities are designed for pre-figured groups with pre-figured needs and interests that actually make a truly shared space impossible. So people give up on it. A space must be actively maintained and turned over by the people who use it. Funding and organisation can not be a one off at the initial stage of development. It must be on-gong because a sustainable development is a work in progress.

I feel that NCH although initially agreeing to our use of their land- to which we will always be appreciative, did not protect us, support our work or incorporate us in ways that could have been innovative and useful both un terms of their charitable work and in terms of the planned new development on the Highbury site. Rather they let the serves run down to such an extent that we were affevtively starved out- the electricity was cut, the water was cut, the storeroom roof begun to give way, there was no security on the site.

We became a liability mixed up in their attitude to the site that everything was running down. But it didn’t need to go that way and their could have been a joint understanding to make use of the land up until active development begun and to continue the community use as a way of researching how best to approach the community aspects of the new development. That could have been a way of learning from and where possible incorporating what was already there. Instead we became the embarrassing relatives who are good on details of preparation but are not invited to the party for fear of what they may do or say.

For ten years we were all but invisible. But when we did go to the press in Aug 2008 to say that, Yes we do exist and have rights and needs, we avoided the immediate eviction of Sep 2008 but ensured in the plans of Action For Children that we would go on the next available date and opportunity in the new year. That is set at march 31st.

The National Autistic Society has recently drawn attention in their “I EXIST” campaign, to the gap in services for adults with autism who are affectively dropped once they no longer fall under child services. Additionally they are often left with no support because they do not fit into mental health or learning disability categories. Many urban environments with an excess of sound, pollution and food additives become intolerable for them causing them gradually to move away from community events and to retreat into isolation. It is ironic that is only at such points of personal crisis that they are then again eligible for help. It is not that autistic people do not want or need community or that that this is a choice and merely a condition of their diagnosis. Rather the model of community needs to adapt to real needs to consider what is actually workable for the participants.

I hope therefore on parting, that Memory Gardens can have its own faint legacy- a quiet insistence, in the new development, of the need to create truly inclusive community space. Action for children could have consulted us over this issue and drawn on our knowledge developed gradually over the last ten years. They chose not to but instead to hurry us out months and probably years before- in this financial climate- the building work commences. It will be interesting to see what happens to this patch of land, now gated and disused, over the forthcoming months and years. We will be following that story carefully, as I hope you will, from outside the gates.