In some alleyways across Britain’s cities, the fly-tipping is so bad that councils close the passages off with iron gates, restricting access just to residents and bin workers. But many locals are taking matters into their own hands — by clearing and greening the narrow passages behind their terraced housing, creating beautiful ad hoc community spaces filled with flowers, vegetables and quirky features.
One of northern England’s most iconic urban features, the alleyways have had prominent roles in the opening credits of long-running TV soap opera Coronation Street and are the backdrop to pop videos such as Oasis’s “Shakermaker”. But they have also been seen as unsanitary, menacing places. In Moss Side, formerly the home of Manchester City FC, what are colloquially known as ginnels were in more unloved times the dominion of the football hooligan and the drug dealer.
Now hundreds of these narrow passages have been reclaimed as valuable communal spaces, overturning prejudices about inner-city residential areas. The best of these grassroots initiatives are on the urban gardening map, attracting enthusiasts from far afield.
There’s no manual for getting started. Most cities have funds for public green space projects but residents often just get out there, clearing, weeding and filling found objects with compost and plants. Mark Edwards turned the alleyway between Acomb and Crofton streets in Moss Side into an area called Reflective Passage. “It evolved in the most organic way possible,” he says. “I didn’t set out to do it — it just kicked on from pot to pot. I didn’t have in mind that it would stretch all the way down the alley.”
Equally, there is no blueprint for what a greened alley should look like. In Moss Side, no two are the same. Some focus on cultivating herbs, fruit and vegetables, while some are purely decorative or act more as social spaces. Others incorporate mosaics, artwork or, like Reflective Passage, concrete poetry displays — “an art gallery in an alley” as Edwards says. Five minutes south, Cloudy Alley, run by Yasmine El-Gabry, benefited from the relocation of a “ginnel garden” project, by Jason Williams, from RHS Tatton in 2023.
Amateur alleyway gardeners learn on the job. Edwards admits to frequent mishaps, giving the example of forgetting to punch holes in a trug so the roots of a banana plant quickly rotted away. His hose does not stretch all the way to the other end, so he placed butts farther down, and uses a watering can for the most distant pots. “Watering is the tough side of it — trying to keep plants alive when it’s 25C every day is tricky,’‘ Edwards says. “Worm tea” nutrients from his backyard wormery helps to keep plants healthy.
El-Gabry says cats use large raised beds as toilets, “which means covering every bed you want to grow food in”. Adds Edwards: “There’s nothing like getting something really wrong. It makes you learn from these things more keenly.”
Knowledge is often shared between local groups. Ticket sales from Moss Side’s Open Alleys day in June — when about 200 people visited — were shared with Manchester Urban Diggers, a community gardening group. A citywide recycling scheme offers free compost. Edwards says council funding via the city’s Neighbourhood Investment Fund, which offers every ward £20,000 a year, comes in useful for bigger items such as planters.
Among the back-to-back terraces in Leeds’s Harehills district, where there was disorder in July after a few residents were forcibly taken into social care, there is much improvisation and reclamation of public space as tiny yards blend into what locals call the “back streets”. “You’ll see bottle gourds and bean plants winding up and over fences,” says local councillor Mothin Ali, who is looking to develop alleyway greening schemes. “People are already doing it in the limited space they have; Bengalis are known for growing vegetables in enclosed spaces. I learnt how to grow vegetables in a bathtub in my garden.”
Setbacks, including theft, sometimes puncture early enthusiasm. Fly-tipping can be a scourge. The creators of the Ginnel Garden, a gated passageway that connects three streets in Stockport, said in an Instagram post last year that their “enthusiasm is truthfully at an all-time low” after piles of fly-tipping spoiled their idyll.
Its blight adds to the workload: “You can report it to the council but it’s just how quickly it gets sorted,” says Edwards. “And if you leave [the mess] for too long, it grows exponentially.”
With the work often being solo endeavours, motivation to keep going can be an issue too. “Would it make it easier if loads of people came out? 100 per cent,” he says, but adds the project “is my choice”.
Revitalising what Paul Dobraszczyk in Manchester: Something Rich and Strange calls these “cracks in the city” brings many benefits — improved physical and mental health, deeper community ties, better hygiene and drainage. Wildflower Alley in Holylands, south Belfast, was relaid with sustainable urban drainage systems that mimic natural drainage patterns, reducing the build-up of silt and moss. They emulate wider initiatives such as Chicago’s Green Alleys, a scheme that rebuilds surfaces to improve water run-off and uses reflective concrete blends to reduce the heat island effect. In turn, Wildflower Alley has inspired scores of similar makeovers across Belfast.
For people who want to support urban greening projects, environmental charity Hubbub’s campaigns have transformed passages in towns such as Doncaster and Fleetwood, while Groundwork has a network of trusts that fund and co-ordinate urban projects, including the “Northern Flowerhouse” scheme to boost biodiversity.
Many non-profits connect with businesses that have money to spend on Corporate Social Responsibility and active staff volunteering programmes. But the overall space is “rather fragmented”, says Williams, who was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to research urban green space in cities including Milan and Wuhan. His mission is to make sure every community has access to funding for “making grey spaces green”.
Paul Roberts, Edwards’s neighbour who produces dance music as K-Klass and helps out with weeding and other work, says Reflective Passage “transformed what was a rather bleak unadopted space, it has also reintroduced a sense of pride in the community”.
There are invaluable personal benefits too. Edwards says: “I didn’t expect to put my hand in the soil and feel better but it does [help] . . . I’ve got no idea why.” Ali, who grew up on a back-to-back, attributes his recovery from ill health to having access to even limited patches of green space to grow flowers and food. “Physically and mentally, it has a massive effect.”
But for many alleyway gardeners, the boom in biodiversity is the biggest blessing. Edwards marvels at “the amount of different wildlife we’re getting in the area”. At Cloudy Alley, El-Gabry says: “We’ve seen every type of pollinator now, with butterflies and bees in abundance this year, which really makes you feel that you’re in nature and not in a huge urban area.”
Edwards says one of the things he is most proud of is “running into people who have taken a different route home to come this way”.
These gardeners are building the next chapter in the urban story. The changing role of the alleyways has been a key feature of their resilience. As Dobraszczyk noted, the terraces were once seen as “outdated and troublesome remnants of the past” but many have outlived the modernist estates that replaced them.
Despite all the individual successes, more funding is needed for alleyway greening and to nurture the pride in working-class areas. After the recent UK riots, Conservative commentator Isabel Oakeshott used a video of a backstreet in Harehills, Leeds to bemoan “the absolute state of our country”.
“Just because the buildings are bad doesn’t mean the people are bad,” says Ali. “We have a lot of poverty, people moving into the community and finding their feet.” But areas like this “give people their start in life, and for that Harehills has to be celebrated”.
A similar sentiment is expressed in Moss Side: “There has always been a lot of civic pride . . . it’s a beautiful neighbourhood,” Edwards says, adding that “it’s fun to push [its image] in the right direction” with greening schemes.
El-Gabry encourages more people to support the green revolution in Britain’s alleyways. It’s a “rollercoaster” she says. “The highs and lows, the celebrations and the challenges are all a part of it and embracing every aspect is really important and part of the fun.”
Murray Withers is an editor on the FT’s World News Desk
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