Working with corporate partners to create beautiful spaces to benefit neighbourhoods

Led by a Chartered Landscape Architect and supported by an experienced Parks and Community Team, our Landscape Academy offers expert landscape advice, design and maintenance for the corporate sector.

If you are creating new public realm, want to improve local green infrastructure, or simply add some greening to your outdoor space – Bankside Open Spaces Trust’s Landscape Academy is here to help. We’ve worked closely with our local community and businesses for over 20 years to create and nurture award-winning and much loved spaces in London’s SE1.

Your space, doing good

By choosing to work with us you’ll be supporting vital charitable work too – Bankside Open Spaces Trust cares for open spaces across SE1, boosts people’s wellbeing through volunteering, events and sports activities and runs training projects to combat the horticultural skills shortage.  

Positive public realm

We can work with you from planning through to ongoing maintenance. We are dedicated to making public realm as good as possible, and to ensuring the local area benefits from green infrastructure.

We work to ensure development proposals provide exceptional benefits to the local community in terms of good environmental standards by encouraging:

  • incorporation of all relevant planning policies, including the Urban Greening Factor

  • incorporation of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals into each development

  • ground planting (to minimise dependence on automatic irrigation systems)

  • ground level green infrastructure, which is genuinely publicly accessible

  • above ground green infrastructure that supplements ground level infrastructure

  • increasing long term canopy cover through tree planting

  • increasing biodiversity

  • new pedestrian and cycling routes, thereby reducing traffic, and increasing air quality

  • improved microclimate

  • no loss of off-site trees to mitigate wind impacts created by the development

  • a net increase in green space

  • Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems, rainwater harvesting and reuse of greywater

  • design that reflects the local community needs and character.

We do this best by:

  • ideally getting involved in development proposals at an early stage

  • inputting into the design or creating design workshops with the client’s design team

  • attending and participating in planning meetings

  • creating, actively participating in or attending public consultation meetings.

Landscape services provided

Design: Working collaboratively, our Chartered Landscape Architect will create a bespoke design for your space. Courtyard, roof garden, balcony, community space or pocket park, we’ll have the right solution for you.

Advice and workshops for developers: For over 20 years Bankside Open Spaces Trusts has worked closely with developers, community groups and local authorities. Our landscape Academy draws on this experience to assist landowners and developers in making the right choices when planning new developments. We can help most when involved from pre-application stage, from the siting of your development, its setting within the urban landscape, assisting you with a sustainability audit and reviewing landscaping proposals.  We can also help in community outreach when planning developments.

Community engagement: As a well-known and trusted organisation, embedded within the local community, we can help you engage with local residents and businesses.

Installation and maintenance: We work with students and graduates from Bankside Open Spaces Trust’s Future Gardeners scheme to create spaces collaboratively with you or your group. Ongoing maintenance can be provided by our graduates, who have attained a City & Guilds level 2 qualification.  All graduates are managed by our project lead, a Chartered Landscape Architect. We can also start and support food growing and gardening clubs within your open space to boost community engagement and ongoing maintenance.

Horticultural advice and sustainable choices: We provide horticultural advice and specify plant species for your particular microclimate, using native species where we can. We specify sustainable construction materials such as timber and recycled stone and aggregate wherever possible and source within the UK. We source all plants from peat-free nurseries, recognising the importance of preserving these habitats for the species they support, and the vital carbon sequestration role peat bogs play.  All plastic pots are reused, so that we break away from single use plastics.

For more information and to talk through your project contact Helen on 07776 063050 or email info@bost.org.uk