Hulme Community Garden Centre...

Now my plan for a garden for the Dig The City Urban Garden Festival has been accepted I'm all over the place looking for inspiration and plants. I called in to The Hulme Community Garden Centre today to see what was on offer.

Hulme is, or was , a roughty toughty suburb of Manchester to the immediate south of the city centre. Our family have connections to it with one branch having been brought up here in a small house, two rooms up, two rooms down, no bathroom and a toilet in a yard out back that wasn't a pleasure to use on a cold winters night. We've come a long was since then to comfortable affluence in a leafy suburb and it was all due to the determination of certain people. I thank them that their hard work has given me my comfortable life.

It was a poor, Victorian, working class suburb. It was torn down in the 1960s and replaced with a brave new world vision of deck access flats and tower blocks. It was poorly built and soon deteriorated into a crime infested, drug fuelled no go area in the city. Eventually enough was enough and that incarnation was torn down to be replaced by houses with gardens and apartments blocks for aspirational people wanting a place close to the city centre or the universities.

While not spoken in the same breath as Didsbury and Chorlton, Hale and Bowden, it is on the up again. On a piece of land the local community have created this garden centre. It might lack the flash of some of the big commercial garden centres in the city but it has heart. It's a little oasis of green and bird song in a very urban part of the city. They are also having a garden at the festival.