About

This 2-year project which has received funding from the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust, started in October 2021 and will end in 2023. The project seeks to engage with the colonial entanglement of gardens and green spaces in the city of Bath and beyond. In collaboration with artists, museums, galleries, academics, civil society groups and individual citizens, it seeks to promote social and spatial justice through focus on a recreational space: the urban garden.

By encouraging a bottom-up decolonisation, it proposes to challenge Eurocentric narratives about plants. Adopting a Co-Creation approach, it will use creative workshops, walk and talks to address a series of contemporary challenges ranging from climate change to food justice and from unequal access to green spaces to the underrepresentation of some social groups as knowledge producers about plants. By looking at the legacies of colonial voyages and conquest, imperial science and Eurocentric representations of plants, and the global displacement of plants and humans, this project will develop a shared understanding of the political meaning of botanical collections, gardens, and green spaces.