Meet the Londoners giving their local areas a DIY makeover through art, gardening and cinema
At the start of the pandemic Ellen Miles was cooped up in a gardenless London flat, bored and fed up.
Victoria Park had been so mobbed that Tower Hamlets council locked its gates, and Miles was sick of sitting on the sofa.
“I was trapped and wanting to connect to nature,” she says.
Then a friend told her how to make seed bombs, a mix of wildflower seeds with (peat free, please) compost and red clay, and she decided to give it a go.
On her daily lockdown walks around Clapton, Miles carried a few in her pockets and when she saw a dismal patch of bare earth she threw in a bomb.
Over the months that followed, Miles’s horticultural activities escalated.
“I was trapped and wanting to connect to nature.”
She put out feelers on her local Nextdoor group and was astounded by the response. Some of her neighbours wanted to go planting with her, others were
