Beautify Balham

Striving for a greener, cleaner and more beautiful Balham.

beautifybalham

Beautify Balham Joins Forces for The Great British Spring Clean 2025

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On Saturday 5th April 2025, we were delighted to surpass our target for this year’s Great British Spring Clean: collecting an impressive 25 bags of litter, well above our original
pledge of 20.

The morning saw a fantastic turnout, with 28 volunteers taking part, including 10 new
faces joining our growing team. It was a pleasure to see such a wide range of
participants united by a shared commitment to a cleaner Balham.

Among the volunteers was a particularly enthusiastic 4-year-old, who enjoyed the
morning so much he continued litter picking across Tooting Common throughout the
afternoon. We were also joined by five Japanese students currently studying in
London, who travelled from West London to take part, as well as a visitor from
Belgium, adding an international touch to the day.

We were especially pleased to welcome our local MP, Dr Rosena Allin-Khan,
accompanied by her daughter, along with Councillor Lyndsey Hedges. Their support
was greatly appreciated and contributed to the strong sense of community on the
day.

Despite the ongoing challenges posed by littering in the area, the enthusiasm and
community spirit were truly inspiring. We were also fortunate to have glorious
weather, which made the event even more enjoyable.

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who took part and helped make a real difference.

If you joined in with our litter pick, or in the Great British Spring Clean this year, let us know on Instagram at @beautifybalham

Endlesham Road Community Garden

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We identified a piece of land belonging to the council in Endlesham Road near Churchcroft Close. On Sunday 27th October 2024, with the help of volunteers and residents, we cleared the rubbish and weeds. We received a microgrant from Wandsworth that helped fund our initial planting, and then went on to plant some shrubs and plants kindly donated by the Wimbledon Tennis Club – left over from the tournament. We also planted lots of Spring bulbs that will hopefully brighten the plot in March and April this year.

It was a great success! It was great to see how residents helped with watering and making cups of tea, and the land looked so much better afterwards. You can see the results for yourself on our Instagram!

We are to continue this month, February 2025, as the council has removed some snowberry bushes that were getting very straggly. We are going to replace them with hawthorn and spindleberry.

Would you like to help us?
Please contact us or email hello@beautifybalham.org to find out more and to join our next planting!

How Sprout Up is helping to Beautify Balham

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Recently we were delighted to hear from Seonaid and Rose at Sprout Up, offering to help us re-home leftover plants from the Wimbledon tennis tournament. With their help, we were able to collect hydrangeas, cornus, euonymus, salvias and ferns – all in Wimbledon’s colours – which we have used to fill gaps in a few of our communal gardens, as well as our new community garden along Chestnut Grove.

Sprout Up is a local garden design and maintenance business with an all-female team who have helped to beautify a great many gardens in Balham and the surrounding area. Their designs are always striking, but what we particularly like is the way they think through how the space will be used – making sure it works for the whole family.

Like us, they are passionate about making Balham more beautiful, supporting nature, protecting against climate change, and getting more people outdoors. As well as working with Beautify Balham, they give back to the community through their social impact arm, Sprout Up Schools – using leftover plants and materials to build better outdoor spaces in schools.

You may have seen Seonaid (pronounced Shona!) and the Sprout Up van at Balham in Bloom 2024, where she offered gardening advice, sold plants and ran seed-sowing activities for children. She is really passionate about helping children from all backgrounds to access nature and her RHS Hampton Court show garden, Believe in Tomorrow, won a silver-gilt medal.

If you are thinking of doing some garden work, do have a look at the Sprout Up website or find them on Instagram.

Balham in Bloom 2024

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For the first time since the creation of the Balham in Bloom competition in June
2020, Beautify Balham hosted a half-day festival featuring remarkable participants:
The Thoughtful Fruiter, Friends of Wandsworth Common, Climate Action Group,
Sprout Up and Jefferson’s Ice-Cream, to name a few. The event was a hive of
activities for all ages and the salsa dancing performed by the talented ‘SASalsa‘
group, and the accomplished musicians of the band ‘Swing Driven Thing‘, made
the whole event truly spectacular.

At 2pm the prizes were distributed to the brilliant winners and runners up for the
Balham in Bloom competition. The categories were:

  • Best residential front garden
  • Best residential communal garden
  • Best window box / hanging basket / terrace
  • Best business frontage

We had some fantastic entries, and our three judges applauded their efforts to green
up Balham.

The Balham in Bloom Festival seeks to highlight the urgent need to green gardens in
our city at a time when urban heat is on the increase and paved gardens exacerbate
run off and flooding. Just adding a few pots on paved areas will help to mitigate
these issues and also add to the dire need for more biodiversity in our streets.

There are plenty of incredibly useful websites and books to help find easy and cheap was to green your garden. Please see a collection of resources below – (so many inspirational stories and tips to make Balham and London greener!):

Websites:

Books:

We would also like to take the opportunity to thank the local businesses who kindly
donated the prizes.

If you want to help Beautify Balham on one of our litter picks or other events, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at hello@beautifybalham.org.

Climate Fresk

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Climate change is a scary notion.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could discover ways of taking direct action?

France, Paris, 2022-12-14. Illustration of the Climate fresk workshops to raise awareness of climate change. Photograph by Mary-Lou Mauricio / Hans Lucas. France, Paris, 2022-12-14. Illustration de l’atelier de la Fresque du Climat pour sensibiliser au dereglement climatique. Photographie par Mary-Lou Mauricio / Hans Lucas.

Cedric Ringenbach, a French engineer, came up with an ingenious idea. He came up with an interactive game, Climate Fresk, that works with the general public and organisations to bring them on board with the climate transition and their mission is to educate the public. In doing so participants are given the opportunity to take constructive and direct action to help tackle climate change. Their ambition is to create a network of people who are able to grow exponentially and share the knowledge on climate change and in doing so reach a social tipping point that will help guide us to a low carbon world. They’ve had 1.5 million participants so far!

How does this work?
The general public is welcome to attend a 3hrs workshop either in person or online. A facilitator – a Climate Fresk volunteer – will teach the participants how climate change works, and empower them to take effective action as a citizen (a maximum of 20 participants per facilitator is permitted). Companies are also welcome to sponsor employees and specific workshops bring together participants from different companies where they are able to explore the levers of action. Within a professional context.

Check out their website to find a workshop next to you – www.climatefresk.org

Cooling streets in heatwaves

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Damien Gayle, journalist at The Guardian newspaper, has published an article that describes how new research suggests green space provides a significant cooling mechanism for urban setting during heatwaves.

New research by the Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCCAR) have just published a comprehensive review into the heat-mitigating effects of green spaces during heatwaves. Their conclusion suggests that sites such as the Chelsea Physic Garden and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew reduce air temperatures during heatwaves by an average of 5C.

London is fortunate to have plenty of green spaces but this can always improve, especially in the centre of town where concrete streets absorb heat and create the urban heat island effect. This phenomenon is caused by structures such as buildings, roads and other metal or concrete infrastructure absorbing heat and re-emitting the sun’s heat, resulting in temperatures rising.

Green spaces, urban parks, wetlands, green walls, and even street trees, were found to significantly mitigate the warm temperatures. The paper goes on to suggest that cities can unlock more benefits by linking green spaces together into ‘green corridors’. These are beneficial in the cooling process but also provide biodiversity channels which are essential at a time when the loss of biodiversity in England is at an all-time high.

Balham is fortunate to be in close proximately to three commons, and plenty of tree lined streets, but more can be done. There are plenty of opportunities to install green walls which would provide a cooling mechanism and establish the green corridors that the paper describes. This valuable new piece of research highlights the importance of green spaces to keep urban populations safe from future heatwaves, and this is especially pertinent as we experienced the warmest February on record for England and Wales.

You can read Damien Gayle’s article at The Guardian here.
Please tag us @beautifybalham if you see any more articles that encourage us to develop our green spaces!