William Place Parklet
A green oasis for Bow, Tower Hamlets.
St Stephen’s Health Centre is situated in a cul-de-sac just off the Roman Road. Reaching the health centre can be a challenge especially on market days due to parked vehicles, uneven pavements and random bollards blocking the footway. This makes access particularly difficult for people with mobility issues and parents with young children in pushchairs. Additionally, many patients suffer from respiratory illness and other chronic health conditions. Tower Hamlets has high levels of air pollution and many residents lack access to green space.
The Health Centre, the Patient Participation Group, and the practice Gardening Group have a vision to create a parklet. The parklet will transform William Place from an unloved grey cul-de-sac into a green oasis for staff and patients at the practice, residents, local schoolchildren, workers and market visitors. To demonstrate what it could be like, they organised Clean Air Day events in 2022 and 2023. William Place was closed to all vehicles and a pop-up parklet was installed as a pleasant place for people to sit and talk, providing shade and greening the space with plants. These events were really popular with patients and the local community. One patient said:
“We live in a small flat with no garden, and it gets so hot during the heatwaves like today. It’s been such a relief to sit here in the shade and enjoy the plants compared to suffering the heat of our flat. And it’s close enough to home that I can manage the walk.”
Health Centre patient and her son, enjoying the pop-up parklet on Clean Air Day, 2022.
We now have the support of Tower Hamlets Council’s Highways and Parks teams to create a permanent parklet outside the Health Centre, with seating, shade and planting.
With the Highways team poised to install the trees, planters and benches to make up the parklet, we just need to raise funds to enable the surgery's gardening group to maintain the parklet.
We need to raise £1,500 to fund tools, equipment and plant consumables.
To raise this money, we’ve created a crowdfunding campaign so that the community at St Stephen’s Health Centre and anyone who wants to support the transition to a cleaner, greener London, can chip in to reach this goal.
We have until 30th April to reach our target.
Will you donate to make the William Place Parklet a reality?
As part of our parklets campaign, we are working with two groups in East London to reclaim parking spaces and turn them into green and vibrant community meeting places.
To find out more about our parklets campaign, including how parklets relates to climate action and ways you can get involved, click the button below.
Photo credit Simon Bonner Photography