Cities as National Parks and community gardens as community glue
In a recent episode of the BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine Podcast, Navdeep Deol, Chair trustee of the National Park City Foundation, offers a simple but quietly radical reframe, cities are not places you escape to find nature, they are places where nature already lives, and where millions of people connect with it every day.
The conversation moves from the big idea, what a National Park City actually is, to the very practical, how a litter-picking habit can grow into a community garden, a volunteer network, and a whole new sense of pride in place. Along the way, Navdeep makes the case that community gardens are not just “nice to have”, they are essential infrastructure for healthier, kinder, more resilient neighbourhoods.
The origin story is not a branding story, it is a litter picker’s story
One of the most compelling parts of the episode is how grounded Navdeep’s own journey is. He describes getting together with friends in Heston (Hounslow), disillusioned by street litter, and starting regular litter picks.
That “one more piece over there” compulsion will be familiar to anyone who has ever done a clean-up. But the story gets more interesting when the group drifts into green spaces, parks, cemeteries, pathways, and riverbanks. They see how quickly nature responds when fly-tipping is cleared, how a place becomes more inviting, how people return.
From there, the group evolves into Heston Action Group and adds community gardening into the mix, partly because litter picking alone can be soul draining. Gardening becomes the counterweight, the visible proof that volunteers are not just fighting a problem, they are growing a better alternative.
A community garden as a living, breathing community hub
Navdeep describes their community garden in a way that feels less like a project and more like a shared organism. It began on an old sports ground blighted by fly-tipping and drug paraphernalia. Volunteers cleared it repeatedly. They planted trees, the trees were stolen, they planted again. Over time, persistence turned into place-making.
The garden grew “organically” (pun fully intended), fruit trees, a hedge, a polytunnel, vegetable beds, a pond, a small tree hub where whips are grown with children, then planted out into schools and parks. But the most important growth is social.
Navdeep talks about a diverse local community sharing ideas about unfamiliar vegetables, swapping recipes, and gathering for harvest festivals where food is cooked and shared. He notes that not everyone comes to garden. Some come for a cup of tea and a chat. Some come for the wheelbarrow workout. Children, older people, and whole families mix, intergenerational by default.
It is a reminder that “community garden” is sometimes too small a phrase for what these spaces do. They are practical, yes. They are also social, emotional, and cultural infrastructure.
The Ranger movement, a spider’s web of connection
A key theme is that London was not transformed because it gained a title. The volunteering, the orchards, the riverbank action, the citizen science, the grassroots energy, all of that was already there, and has been for years.
What the London National Park City has tried to do, Navdeep explains, is amplify that existing energy by building capacity. He describes this as helping community “heroes” connect, share skills, and support one another, so the movement becomes less like isolated pockets and more like a web.
He shares a vivid example, a Shroom Sunday mushroom celebration where Rangers with different skills came together to organise a festival, drawing people across borough boundaries. That cross-pollination matters, because it multiplies impact. When volunteers collaborate across neighbourhoods, ideas travel faster, and confidence follows.
Pride in place is not a slogan, it is a practice
The conversation returns again and again to a simple mechanism, people care for what they feel belongs to them, and people feel ownership when they have agency.
Litter picking, community gardening, and local nature action build pride in place. They also build relationships. You meet neighbours you have never spoken to. You start to recognise faces. You begin to feel that your area is not just where you sleep between work shifts, it is somewhere you shape.
Navdeep’s framing is quietly political without being party political, if we want greener, healthier, wilder places, we have to support the people who already do the work of caring.
Green corridors, urban growth, and the hard question of “how do we measure change?”
The podcast does not shy away from the structural stuff. Navdeep talks about green corridors as routes for biodiversity, not just pleasant human promenades. He notes threats too, gardens paved over, trees removed for development, housing targets that can squeeze green space, and biodiversity net gain credits that can end up leaving the city rather than reinvesting locally.
Monitoring progress is hard in London, he says, partly because of the borough structure and shifting initiatives. The Foundation’s response is pragmatic, focus on communities as the “unit of change”, work borough by borough, support cohorts of local Rangers, and build an approach that can sustain itself with occasional nudges rather than constant central management.
He describes three practical supports the Foundation offers Rangers and local groups:
Small Grant Funding, quick small grants without marathon applications
Advocacy and storytelling, including blogs, videos, social media, and use of a podcast studio at the Visitor Centre
Networking and training, helping people meet, learn, and collaborate
There is also a celebratory note, a donation of free billboard space used to showcase Rangers across London in a campaign called Do London Differently, a public reminder that everyday people are already doing extraordinary work.
Community gardens are not “nice”, they are essential
If there is one line of thought that keeps sharpening as the episode goes on, it is this, community gardens should be seen as essential parts of the urban fabric.
Navdeep lists the roles they play, reducing isolation, supporting social prescribing, bringing different communities together, helping with food insecurity, boosting wellbeing, supporting climate and biodiversity action, creating education opportunities, and getting people physically active outside.
He even suggests a better name, community hubs.
The message lands because it is not theoretical, it is lived. You can hear the weekly rhythm of it, Sundays at the garden, people turning up for different reasons, all benefiting anyway.
A hopeful ending, think bigger, start local
Navdeep’s hopes for the future are both ambitious and grounded, grow the Ranger movement sustainably across all of London, and inspire other cities to take the journey too. The core invitation is to stop treating nature as a weekend destination and start treating your home landscape as something worth celebrating, protecting, and expanding.
Not incremental tweaks. A bold vision. A city that puts nature at its heart, for nature’s sake, and for the wellbeing of everyone who lives there.
