ABOUT US
Up The Garden Bath is committed to educating, fighting food poverty, recycling, creating opportunities, empowering, promoting health and wellbeing and environmental improvement.
Up The Garden Bath is an award winning Community Interest Company in Peterborough. We work with local businesses to reduce waste and landfill. We take unwanted waste materials that would usually end up in landfill such as old bathtubs and upcycle them into educational garden planters and accessories.
Our upcycled bathtub planters are installed into schools, community centres and residential care homes. We use our upcycled bathtub planters to educate people all about recycling, gardening and sustainability. Since launching in February 2020 we have installed over 50 upcycled bathtub planters across Cambridgeshire and delivered our educational workshops to over 10,000 children of varying ages & learning abilities.
Gardening has been proven to be beneficial to mental and physical wellbeing and we aim to make gardening accessible to everyone regardless of their demographic or physical abilities. We are recycling experts and can turn most things into a garden orientated item. Pretty much anything & everything can play a role in growing plants, you just have to have the ideas & the imagination.
Old bathtubs have been reused on allotments for years but our project entails building a raised wooden surround for the bathtub, this transforms it into a raised & contained growing space at a height that is easily accessible for children, the elderly or disabled. Our recycled, raised & contained planters are ideal for any garden space, be it in a residential care home, community centre but especially in schools & are a real alternative to costly raised growing areas.
Why a Bath?
Bathtubs are often fly tipped as the cost of disposal can be costly, they are notoriously hard to recycle and usually end up in landfills or have to be broken up into smaller pieces using heavy machinery & then incinerated in industrial furnaces. Not exactly the most eco-friendly item in the world!! We like to think we are doing our bit for the environment by recycling, reducing landfill, reviving, repurposing & reusing.
Up The Garden Bath is committed to creating opportunities and our planters are produced by a network of individuals who have found their route into mainstream employment blocked for varying reasons. This could be due to disability, addiction issues or mental health problems.
We work with local youth organisations & supported living charities to empower people & create opportunities through hands-on learning.
We also work with local communities to create community gardens and regenerate run down unkempt areas & fly tipping hotspots into pop up pollinator parks designed to encourage and enhance inner city wildlife. These community based projects encourage social cohesion and encourage communities to take pride in their area.
Our mission is to reduce landfill whilst promoting recycling, sustainability and healthy living through gardening.
OUR PROJECTS
BEE CAMPAIGN 2019
A third of Britain’s bee species have declined since 1980 – an alarming trend that threatens the collapse of entire ecosystems, and the viability of agriculture which relies on natural pollination. Without natural pollinators, there wouldn’t be much more than bread, bananas and rice on our supermarket shelves.
We’re incredibly excited to be working with Jimmy Doherty, Channel 4, Red Sky Productions and Screen Scotland to try to make a real difference to Britain’s threatened bees. It’s a hugely ambitious project and it is an honour to be involved as we transform spaces in Peterborough to show what can be done to conserve and protect our little buzzy friends.
This exciting campaign allowed us to trial our new "Pollen Paradise" planter
which has been designed with the needs of wildlife in mind.
Created with a selection of plants to nourish and sustain bees all year round.
IQBAL COMMUNITY CENTRE
Lead by the irrepressible Richard Ferris alongside a number of local contractors & volunteers the once barren patch of land outside of the Iqbal Community Centre in Peterborough was renovated & modernised into an amazing community pocket park.
The park itself was funded by a Pocket Park grant from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. The landscaping was carried out by
Liam Doherty of Crega Landscapes, a Peterborough-based company.
In the space of little over 6 weeks, the patch of rough grass that used to sit
outside the Centre has been transformed into somewhere special.
It's buzzing with bees, hoverflies, and butterflies; and many local people now
enjoy relaxing in this little oasis!
It was a privilege for Up The Garden Bath to be involved with this amazing project and to bring a bit of green into a previously grey area.
BRAMBLES PRE-SCHOOL, BRAMPTON
Up The Garden Bath Pilot Scheme - August 2019 -
To test demand for our new educational product we ran a competition on Facebook.The competition was open to Pre Schools & Primary Schools in the Cambridgeshire area but was restricted to one vote per person.
The winning school would win one of our new "mini allotments"
with installation due in Spring 2020.
We only expected a couple of hundred comments and were amazed when we received nearly 6,000 entries spread over 200 local schools.
The Brambles Pre School in Brampton was the eventual winner after their PTA group mobilised a significant amount of support & enthusiasm for the project.
The response to our "Pilot Scheme"convinced us to create
UP THE GARDEN BATH.
