PLANT STORIES & COLONIAL LEGACIES East London – May 2026

a participatory walk mapping botanical histories, empire and urban ecologies

This participatory walking event took place within the former grounds of East London’s historic Loddiges Nursery, exploring how colonial plant histories remain embedded within contemporary landscapes.

Through guided walking, collective storytelling and a sequence of illustrated cards, participants traced the journeys of plants imported into Britain during the expansion of global plant trading in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Passing alongside the Nursery’s now-demolished glasshouses, participants encountered stories voiced from the plants’ perspective: their capture by plant hunters, their arduous journeys across oceans and their arrival in London’s docks, where they became objects of trade, collection and display.

In a nearby public park, participants encountered plant species whose ancestors had arrived during the era of Loddiges Nursery. Observing the plants’ overcrowded arrangement, inherited from eighteenth-century English garden traditions, prompted reflection on the legacy of colonial systems of extraction, garden design and plant collecting. Through these migration stories, participants considered how histories of displacement, global movement and appropriation remain embedded within, and continue to shape, everyday landscapes.

The event was presented during the Hackney Histories Festival 2026, London Open House 2025 and the London Festival of Architecture 2025.