City garden's special purpose

A STUNNING award-winning garden has been relocated from the Chelsea Flower Show to Plymouth's homeless centre, in Stonehouse.

- By CARL EVE [e-mail]

The peaceful 'safe space' has been created in a bare backyard patch of the Shekinah Mission, now at its new base at the former Stonehouse Creek community centre. The centre was gifted the garden thanks to the national homelessness and health charity, Pathway.

The ribbon-cutting event was held last Friday and saw members of the public, along with supporters and the Lady Mayor, get a closeup look at the garden, which wowed the crowds - and judges - at the Royal Horticultural Society's famous Chelsea Flower Show this year.

The garden was opened by Alex Bax, Pathway chief executive, and Pathway volunteers with personal experience of homelessness whose insights inspired the garden designed by Allon Hoskin and Robert Beaudin, of Modular.

Acclaimed by leading horticultural journalists and garden experts as a garden that is changing lives, the Pathway Garden will provide a place of rest and recovery for people being supported out of homelessness to better health by the Shekinah Centre and the Health Inclusion team (HIPP) supported by Pathway at University Hospitals, Plymouth.

Working collaboratively with organisations across Plymouth, the expert homelessness team at University Hospitals Plymouth part of Pathway's national network of hospital homelessness teams and the Shekinah Centre demonstrate the transformative impact of joined-up integrated care networks which are critical to tackling homelessness and extreme health inequalities.