The Garden Project

In 2008, I was the artist in residence at Catalyst Arts, in Belfast. Catalyst had a programme titled ‘The Garden Project’. I visited the gallery space regularly and grew vegetables on their rooftop garden. I was also searching the city for vacant lots and managed to identify a couple of sites. On July 15th, with wheelbarrows full of potted vegetables and gardening tools, I set out from Catalyst with a group of guerilla gardeners, visiting various sites near the city centre. We got to work digging and planting out veg, discussing the potential of various sites and how we might maintain them. We had a lot of fun, but sadly our little gardens didn’t last long, except the lone broccoli that seemed to thrive on Great Victoria Street.
As part of my research for the project, I spent some time at the Belfast Central Library looking through old maps of the city. In times of crisis, people look for other means to provide for their needs. I had read somewhere that there were many allotments, so-called victory gardens, planted in the city during World War 2. After taking some photos of the old maps, I overlaid the images on top of more recent images from Google Maps. I set out on my bike to visit the locations to see how things had changed. Some gardens still exist, such as at the Waterworks and on the Ardoyne road, while others were turned into sports grounds, or paved over and built upon. Curiously, there were a couple of sites that were simply left as empty fields, with potential for local communities to reclaim those spaces. At that time, I had no way of knowing who owned those sites. Interestingly, a more recent project, https://www.takebackthecity.ie/map shows that the site near Fort William, identified in the image below remains unused and in public ownership.