It was an unlikely route to a harvest festival, walking past grey tower blocks in a run-down part of East London without even a window box in sight. Against such a background, the colour and cheerfulness of Abbey Gardens was nothing short of stunning for visitors to the community garden’s first harvest festival in 2009. it felt like walking into a painting, and the effect was instantly uplifting. Dramatic sunflowers 6ft tall were like welcoming smiles at the centre of 34 long raised beds bursting with flowers and vegetables.
Along a back wall were the intriguing words “What Will The harvest Be?” in large orange letters.
On that day, the harvest was a bountiful one, enough to treat 200 local residents to a free lunch cooked on site by visiting chef Sam Clark of the restaurant Moro.
Bunches of sweet peas and bags of vegetables were available for donations from an honesty stall, a gesture of trust that is typical of the garden’s spirit.

Three years earlier, this garden did not exist. The 80m x 30m rectangular site was overgrown and neglected, inaccessible to the public and regularly abused by fly-tippers and vandals.
Unbeknown to most residents of newham, the site was one of only two scheduled ancient monuments in their borough. Deep beneath soil long contaminated by nearby industry lay the remains of the gatehouse to a 12th century Cistercian abbey. Monks once ran a productive kitchen garden here. There had been an enjoyment of food, an exchange of cultures as visitors brought spices from other countries.

In 2006, a group of local residents formed Friends of Abbey Gardens (FOAG). “The main motivation was to develop the land into a communal and social space, driven and governed by residents and users,” says Andreas Lang, a founding member of the group who also designed the garden’s characterful honesty stall and trugs. The group hoped that lots more people would be inspired and get involved, which was essential to the success of the project. The land was leased from the local council.

Artist duo Karen Guthrie and nina Pope were approached by FOAG and won a commission to create an artwork on the site. They were both self-taught gardeners interested in local food production. Consultation with local residents showed that there was a lot of interest in growing food, but little experience, knowledge or opportunity.
They devised a two-phase plan, the first part being to create a temporary harvest garden as an experiment so that FOAG could try out their ambition to grow their own food on quite a large scale. The second part of the plan was for a permanent, more carefully landscaped garden.
It was a photograph that inspired the design of the harvest garden, one that caught Karen and Nina’s attention when they were researching local history. A group of unemployed men in July 1906, dressed in the clothing of their different occupations, standing in a line on the day that they were arrested for taking over a vacant plot of land to grow food. The men were known as the Plaistow Land Grabbers.
“It was an inspiring image and story,” says Karen. On a wall in the photograph are the words ‘What Will The harvest Be?’, which Karen and Nina took as the name of their project. A blown-up copy of the photograph now covers the front of the cabin at Abbey Gardens. The name of the men’s endeavour, Triangle Camp, and the shape of their garden inspired the triangular design of the raised beds at Abbey Gardens.
To overcome the contamination problem, the site was covered with a protective membrane, and new soil was brought in. In the first year the choice of plants was restricted to those that would grow in one season. “We wanted people to see it go from nothing to a full garden,” says Nina. Seeds were donated by Chiltern Seeds in Cumbria.
The choice of bold colours rather reflects the boldness of the project. Unlike the usual allotment system, everything is grown communally. The garden is maintained by volunteers at three drop-in gardening sessions a week led by a paid gardener. 
There are no rules about how much work a volunteer has to do or how much produce can be taken, and somehow that works well.
The garden is also open to the public every day. This was a risk because the project could have been ruined by vandalism and theft. “We had a strong hunch that if it looked good enough people wouldn’t damage it, they would respect it,” says nina.