A DAY OF WALKS, TALKS, WORKSHOPS AND COMMUNITY – CELEBRATING THE PEOPLE WORKING TO CONNECT LONDONERS WITH LOCAL NATURE
Across each London Borough, our brilliant Rangers are quietly helping to transform their neighbourhoods. Creating pollinator pathways, running fungi forays, protecting our rivers, and bringing outdoor learning to schoolchildren, they’re constantly working to better connect communities with local nature, and in turn helping to protect them too.
So this Saturday 17 October, we are bringing Rangers, friends, family and newcomers together to celebrate their incredible work to make London greener, healthier and wilder.
early bird tickets
Tickets are selling fast, so get your hands on a £5 Early Bird ticket while you can.Â
Along with the ticket, you’ll get:
- A copy of the London National Park City ‘12 Ways to Connect with People and Nature in London’ Newspaper, packed with stories of Londoners exploring and engaging with the city’s natural spaces through art, connection, observation and skill sharing.
- Access to the Festival Marketplace along with talks from Rangers, market stalls, an arts and crafts zone and so much more!
What's On
There is so much to look forward to throughout the day, with talk panels, specialist workshops and a film festival all going on. Some you’ll need to book ahead, others you can simply turn up to.
Watch this space for more information on tickets, speakers and workshop lineups!
Select the calendar name below to view the full schedule
Walks
Fruity Walk with Ranger Divya
Time: 11:30 – 12:30
Led by Divya Herrero, urban fruit tree forager and founder of Fruity Walks, this one-hour guided walk invites you to slow down, look up, and completely reimagine your relationship with the trees we live alongside. Through story, observation, and a little foraging folklore, Divya will help you see your city through entirely different eyes – one fruit tree at a time.
A Mushroom Foray with Ranger Mike
Time: 12:30 – 13:30
Join Mike from the London Fungus Network for a one-hour foray into the fungal world. Together you will learn to identify common mushroom species, explore the extraordinary role of fungi in the urban ecosystem, and discover why these often-overlooked organisms are some of the most important living things in the city. Please note: this walk is for educational purposes and is not a foraging course.
Toy Camera Photowalk with Ranger Chris Hope-Fitch
Time: 13:30 – 14:30
Limited to ten places
Join Chris Hope-Fitch for a one-hour photowalk in and around Churchill Gardens Estate, using toy cameras as a way of seeing a familiar urban environment with completely fresh eyes. Every participant will have a camera to use that prints small black-and-white images as you go – capturing the estate’s strong geometric architecture, its surprisingly varied flora, and the textures that usually go unnoticed.
At the end of the walk, you will have the chance to stick your prints into a small zine – a handmade memento of the afternoon.
Nature Folklore Walk with Ranger Chris Collier
Time: 10:30 – 11:30
Join naturalist and urban guide Chris Collier for a one-hour walk uncovering the myths, folklore, and hidden histories woven into the common trees and plants growing around Churchill Gardens Estate. Expect tales of magic and faery feats, forgotten customs, and the extraordinary plant persons who have shaped how Londoners have understood the natural world for centuries.
Sing and Stroll with Ranger Catherine Pestano
Time: 14:30 – 15:30
Walking and singing have always belonged together – and this is your chance to find out why. Join Catherine Pestano for a joyful, communal walk through the green spaces around Churchill Gardens Estate, weaving song into the rhythm of the route. No experience needed, no performance required – just a willingness to open up, be present, and let the music change the way you move through the city.
Talks
A lineup is stacked with some incredible speakers. Talks will be centred around five different themes; Community, Growing & Land, Rivers, Reuse & Repair, and Resilience. There’ll be three speakers for each topic, with some open discussion and question answering to keep conversations open and engaging.
Film Festival
London Nature Films Festival
A pop-up festival of live-action and animation films with their makers and causes from urban green spaces.
Time: 2pm – 6:30pm
A pop-up festival of live-action and animation films with their makers and causes from urban green spaces. Docs and shorts about nature and greening activities from personal stories and nature conservation to urban gardening, outdoor wellbeing, and campaigning. Through rare film screenings and thought-provoking talks, we explore these themes through the eyes of filmmakers and the everyday heroes of the city’s green spaces. Our work lies at the intersection of cities, filmmaking, and nature.
Paradise for Who
Jackie Turner
2.05pm – 2.30pm
A community garden in London sits in the shadow of an imposing Victorian prison, and the film charts its history and hopes for the future.
Plant Community
Samuel Joseph Phelps, Jemima Daisy Priest
2.30pm – 2.55pm
A vignette of the quietly unassuming but busy urban gardener, in which four individuals see guerrilla gardening through their own lens, from calming the mind to healing bodies and feeding communities.
Bollywood Badmarshes Go Bush
Susie Vickery
2.55pm – 3.10pm
Inspired by Bollywood action films and Indian miniature painting, this tale sees Western Australia’s endangered animals reach out to Bollywood miscreants for help against environmental destruction.
The Leaves of London
Joshua Geer
3.10pm – 3.30pm
A short documentary exploring the emotional relationships people form with urban trees, told through four intimate stories, each centred on a single tree and the person who returns to it.
Earthly
Anna de Rijk
3.30pm – 3.45pm
Follows a group of female farmers at the organic farm Perkuus on the edge of Brussels, whose calm, repetitive work contrasts with the city as they seek gentler ways of working the land during a very dry season.
Nature Is Gayer Than You Think
Jamy Silver
3.45pm – 4.00pm
Examines what “natural” really means when it is used to judge sexuality, gender roles and family structure, and finds that nature is far queerer than expected.
If I Eat You Will We Both Still Be OK? (Plant)
Rhona Eve Clews
4.00pm – 4.20pm
Shot while crawling across a Cornish field with a macro lens, the film journeys through plant stories, working-class autobiography, colonial botanies and more-than-human entanglement.
Nature Ain’t a Luxury
Louis Butler
4.20pm – 4.30pm
Description awaiting confirmation from Mark.
Interbeing
Lily Plester
4.30pm – 4.40pm
An experimental short visualising the hidden activity of the mycorrhizal network, combining cinematography, data-driven animation and a soundtrack made from MIDI data and EMF frequencies collected from plants and fungi.
Rock Dove.
Ryan Powell
4.40pm – 5.00pm
Follows a group of London volunteers who meet on Sundays to catch pigeons and carefully remove string and hair from their feet, an act of care across the species divide.
Touch Some Soil
Erika Lau
5.00pm – 5.10pm
An urban farmer at a community farm teaches us to slow down, exploring South Asian growing, cultural memory, collective care and food justice in the city.
Becoming Wild
Jane Pittman
5.10pm – 6.00pm
In a Virginia neighbourhood changed by gentrification and loss of green space, a backyard becomes a sanctuary for wildlife, showing how beauty survives when we nurture it.
The Hispering
Sally Payne
6.00pm – 6.15pm
A sequence of prose-poem-like glimpses between dream, waking and storytelling, taking in meadows, oceans, fairytales and unseen creatures, about how the world speaks to us if we listen.
Insolito
Ralf Berkus, Ulrike Berkus
6.15pm – 6.45pm
An apparently ordinary quarry lake near Karlsruhe in southern Germany is home to turtles, rare freshwater shrimp, bizarre microorganisms and predatory fish with fearsome teeth.
The Nature of Nature
Laura Leigh deNey
6.45pm – 7.20pm
An ode to the variety of life in the Hudson Valley, from high-elevation forests to the globally rare tidal marshes of the Hudson estuary.
Workshops
Grow Your Own Mushrooms Workshop
Workshop with Fat Fox Mushrooms
Time: 10:30am- 12pm
Learn to grow mushrooms on coffee grounds and other household waste. Mushrooms are nature’s master recyclers. Without fungi, the planet would be buried under undecomposed organic matter, and the rich, fertile soils that support life would never form.
In this hands-on workshop, you’ll explore the fascinating lifecycle of fungi and discover how mushrooms transform everyday waste into nutritious food. We’ll show you how to build a simple growing system using common household materials such as used tea leaves and coffee grounds.
Cyanotype Workshop
Acyanotype-printing workshop where you can experiment with the technique on both paper and fabric.
Time 12:30pm – 2pm
Ranger Mo will run a cyanotype-printing workshop where you can experiment with the technique on both paper and fabric, as well as using reference images, cut out text, free-drawing, pressed plants and found objects. You can also collect natural material directly from the site or bring your own things to experiment with. Everyone will leave with their own paper print and printed fabric bookmark, featuring your collaged explorations of the human nature relationship.Mo is an artist with a background in environmental biology, exploring being human on a shared planet through collaborations with people and places.
Photography and Nature: Storytelling and Ethic Workshop
Building a reportage or a story to document and share knowledge about the natural world.
Time: 2:30pm – 4pm
Building a reportage or a story to document and share knowledge about the natural world. A workshop focused on giving an ensemble of what it means to document the nature and biodiversity while respecting the nature. The light, the slow approach, the knowledge before the shooting.Â
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Marketplace
No fayre is complete without a bustling marketplace. The hall will be lined with a host of fantastic stalls and educational stands. From a pop-up Hoxton Mini Press bookshop to a Fat Fox Mushroom stand, there’ll be plenty of chances to chat to the people from CPRE, whilst getting your next gift sorted.
Free Activities
During the festival, we’ll be hosting a free activity corner in the hall which will offer all sorts of amazing opportunities to get your arts and crafts on. Try your hand at Seed Snail making, a space-saving gardening method for starting seeds or cuttings, or get stuck in with Zine Making with Eleanor from Wild South London.
Confirmed EventsÂ
- Get wild – paint! Led by Sarah CarlinÂ
Description: Unleash your inner creativity and discover the power of using natural objects to paint and make something beautiful. Fun for kids of all ages! - Fixing Table pop-up stall
Description:Â A community-powered repair hub designed to fix broken household electronics, reduce electrical waste, and teach practical repair skills.
Where to find us
Churchill Gardens Estate, Pimlico
Located in Pimlico and only a seven-minute walk from Pimlico Tube station lies the Churchill Gardens Residents Hall, a community venue located on the historic public housing development.
A charitable, voluntary and independent group of residents from Churchill Gardens and Russell House formed some 75 years ago, with the building serving as their central hub for the Residents Association, and a perfect spot for our Festival!
Full Address: Churchill Gardens, London, SW1V 3AL
Stay In The Loop
Not ready to book yet? Sign up for festival updates and we will let you know when workshop and walk tickets go on sale.