St James Street Big Local (SJSBL) is a group of volunteers helping to deliver resident-led improvements in the St James Street neighbourhood of Walthamstow. Street ‘greening’ is a community priority and the Five Streets project, supported by the Mayor of London, looks at new innovative ways for residents to collectively improve their street environments. The ‘Five Streets’ are made up of over 250 households, two schools and fifteen businesses and the footprint of all residential gardens equals the area of four football pitches.

Through working together with residents we identified two strategies for action: a ‘Greening Toolkit’ and a scoping study of ‘Linking Projects’. The Greening Toolkit aims to create rich and diverse planting in front gardens and provides residents with a simple menu of greening tools. This includes a broad range of plants for pots, native hedgerow planting packages, garden composting kits and rainwater harvesting equipment.

‘Linking Projects’ is a series of proposed improvements to green communal spaces with the aim of bringing communal care and attention to the currently unloved and poorly maintained spaces. Projects focus on roadside verges and junctions, pedestrian passageways, a school entrance and a community pavilion in a public park.