Grow Club is a new long-term community programme by Devonshire Collective that centres on growing as a way to connect, share and be together. The project is a collective initiative that draws on different expertise and experiences across art, architecture, gardening and design. Grow Club will explore the relationship between art and civic life, fostering co-creation and facilitating connection to the local ecology. 

Plotting begins 

In year one, we are focusing on co-creating planters for four streets in the Devonshire Ward. Working with our Community Advisory Panel, Cella Collective, Rooted Community Food, The Eastbourne Blind Society, Bourne Primary School and our Associate Artists, we will be creating planters for residents that become micro-sensory gardens, growing scented flowers and edible plants. 

To celebrate this initial phase of Grow Club, we will be hosting a day of creative activities, film screenings, seed shares, food that connect to growing as well as the opportunity to talk to us about the project on Saturday 30th November 2024, 10am - 4pm at Eastbourne Blind Society, 124-142 Longstone Rd, Eastbourne, BN22 8DA.

‍Laying the groundwork 

Over the last six months, we have been researching this project with our Community Advisory Panel, looking into coastal nature, health and wellbeing benefits, Eastbourne’s history and artist-led approaches to local materials. We will continue to use this space as a journal for Grow Club. 

"Garden flowers, potted plants, and cut flowers improve our moods and raise our spirits. Perhaps there has been a rapid coevolution between us and the flowers over the last ten millennia, a mutualistic dance in which both partners benefitted, still evolving but transforming one another. Flowers always make us smile." - Stephen Buchmann, The Reason for Flowers.

Allotments have a significant history in Eastbourne; among the first in the UK, Mary Ann Gilbert founded the early allotments in the town in the 1830s as a means of advocating for social reform, empowering families to grow their own vegetables. Our allotment partners Rooted Community Food continue this legacy. A volunteer-centred food growing project, Rooted aims to grow, gather & donate 2.5 tonnes of cost-free food for Eastbourne in 2024. You can watch the film we made with them, Vessels for a Garden, here. 

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Cella is a collective of makers exploring the relationship between spaces, materials and ecology through building, teaching and writing. The team has completed structures, interiors, research, furniture and educational workshops in the UK, Portugal and The Netherlands. They have collaborated with a long list of people, groups and institutions, including artists, earth construction experts, regeneration projects and community groups. Focusing on the need to rediscover a harmonious relationship between culture and nature, Cella view situations through the lens of inter-being: seeing communities as collections of people, materials and landscapes which stretch across vast timescales.

‍Rooted Community Food is a volunteer-led food project in Eastbourne. Their team of around 30 dedicated growers tend and harvest crops on two allotment plots on Gorringe Road. Using sustainable growing methods, they’ve accumulated valuable knowledge and skills in their 'living library'. In just its second growing season, Rooted has grown and gathered an impressive 3.4 tonnes of fresh, healthy food. This bounty is donated to community fridges across Eastbourne, where anyone can shop affordably. Beyond food, Rooted fosters a supportive community, a place of peace, laughter, and well-being for its volunteers.

Devonshire Collective’s Community Advisory Panel is Margaret Bannister, Marie Burgess, Chris Dixon, Gaynor Sadlo, Judith Alder, Debbie Harris, Emma Millar, Mana Hashtroudi and Loupe Cooper.

Funded by the National Lottery Community Fund. 

References: 

The Reason for Flowers, Stephen Buchmann, 2015

A Flower for Everyday, Margery Fish, 1973