Meet Plant NOMA: the team redefining Manchester’s urban biodiversity
If you’ve been passing through Manchester’s NOMA district lately, close to Victoria Station, you’ll have noticed there’s an urban oasis beginning to creep in. This is thanks to Plant NOMA, a small team who have been working alongside developers to turn unclaimed spaces across the development site into biodiverse community gardens.
We caught up with Andy from Plant NOMA to chat about how they engage community members in growing, the importance of biodiversity in urban spaces and what the future looks like for the city of Manchester.
“There's a lot of new knowledge that we've gained from growing in the urban environment that you wouldn't be able to read in any books.”
Andy, Plant NOMA
How did Plant NOMA get started?
We’ve been down at NOMA as a studio, Standard Practice (SP), for about eight years now. SP specialise in creating projects which encourage active citizenship and participation with place. The first project we did at NOMA, which is probably still one of our most well-known, was building The Pilcrow Pub, a pub designed and built with 600 volunteers through a series of workshops. That sort of started off what we wanted to do down here, involving local people in creating the NOMA neighbourhood.
Then COVID struck. We had to leave the building that we were occupying at the time, so we decided to step out and look at the space between the buildings. That was how Plant NOMA started, and we actually built a garden without the land owners permission - basically guerrilla gardening. One of our gardeners here took it upon themselves to work on a very derelict area which was right next to one of the building sites. We built this little garden with a veg patch and a herb garden, and it was very well received and people wanted to get involved. So we went back and said “is this something you want us to do?”, and it grew from there really.
We ended up taking on a full time RHS trained gardener, Liz, who's now our head gardener, and then the rest has been us learning as we go, which is quite a nice thing about this project - it's sort of like have-a-go-horticulture.
Had you personally done much gardening before?
Not at all. I was interested, but I'd never had experience with it. All of us have just sort of learnt as we've gone on, but we’ve also learned through people coming down as well, some volunteers have a lot of experience and some don't have any.
There's a lot of new knowledge that we've gained from growing in the urban environment that you wouldn't be able to read in any books. You wouldn't know from doing an RHS course that certain things can grow in conditions in city centres that wouldn't be able to grow in another environment. You can very much call it city gardening. It has its own definition, and very much its own parameters.
“Our role is to inspire, educate and bring together a community, empowering human cooperation and promoting the value of all living things. Building a garden and building a community.”
What are some of your main goals now that working across multiple sites?
I think our approach to using any of the spaces that we've been granted permission to work on is to make engagement the main part of that, and engagement not in the traditional sense. You can obviously always weed, you always need to water and those kinds of things, which provide really good engagement and people get a lot out of that. But we're being very particular with the planting selections that we're doing, so there's always an added element of engagement. We're always planting things that can be used for something, whether that's making teas with a group, or something we can make a workshop out of, or whether that is growing willow that you can weave into something later down the line. We try and always make sure there’s another function to it, and that means that if you're not into gardening, there's another reason for you to get involved with these kinds of things.
We need more and more volunteers to get involved and to feel that they can make a change in the city. Our role is to inspire, educate and bring together a community, empowering human cooperation and promoting the value of all living things. Building a garden and building a community.
How do you try to involve the local community?
We have a couple of different ways for people to get involved with the project. On Mondays and Tuesdays we run drop-in daytime volunteering sessions and we also run a very popular informal evening gardening club run by Joe Hartley, which is a little bit more experimental in its nature and is maybe a little bit more social.
Alongside this we also work closely with several local charities, schools and other organisations who come down to take part in workshops or help with volunteering hours. Over time we’ve built really strong relationships with organisations who call NOMA home, and they’ve become integral to what we do here in terms of having the manpower to achieve what we've managed to achieve, and they feel invested. You find that people do come out just on a lunch break, and do half an hour of gardening regardless of whether we're there or not. That's exactly what we wanted when we started.
What are some of the challenges you face in creating new green spaces in Manchester?
Challenge wise, I think it's all about using the right language for the right people to get them on board. We predominately work with developers in the private sector so being able to present back to them the value in the projects, not just from a social value perspective, but also environmentally, is hugely important. And a lot of this work requires a large amount of data collection and testimonials from people. It’s not enough for us to simply say this ‘feels’ like a good thing, we need to be able to back that up with data. There’s a lot of really interesting work being done at the moment around biodiversity net gain for developments that I think we’ll be hearing a lot more about in the next couple of years. I guess the other sort of key challenge is getting people to know that this is possible and to come down and experience it.
It seems as though a lot of your spaces are very natural, and almost wild in a sense. Was this your intention?
That’s really nice to hear, I'm glad it looks that way. Something like Sadler's yard is still consciously a little more formal in the way that it presents, a little bit more of a traditional city centre planting scheme. But elsewhere we’ve applied a much more experimental approach, with an understanding from the developer that this is the way that, for biodiversity purposes, these spaces need to exist in cities. They’re also hugely important for climate resilience and for the way that we adapt to the changing climate. We need to have spaces that aren't just mown lawns or very traditional planting, we need to adapt and we need to experiment in those areas.
We’re about to have a study done on our biodiversity increase since we've started doing the project. But anecdotally, some of the increases that we've seen have been pretty incredible, and I could bore you to death with the variance in moth species and insect species that we've been looking at. We came across an elephant hawkmoth the other day! Seeing those kinds of things and being able to demonstrate those back to the developer is a really key part of it. I think it’s really showing that this stuff is making a difference.
What do you think is the future of green spaces in the city centre?
I think the key thing in the next 5 to 10 years is connecting a lot of these existing green spaces up. I think there's some really cool stuff happening in Manchester, and in cities all over the place, but what's quite difficult at the moment is a lot of those green spaces in cities are still very disjointed.
I went to Oslo recently and one of the things you notice there is as you walk from the suburbs to the centre you never really have to walk on a road, you never have to walk around somewhere that's not a green space. You see trees, you see greenery wherever you are, and I think that is going to be hugely key to the stuff that is happening here. We’re involved in several conversations with the National Trust and the Council looking at how these things can work and how it's going to be pieced together.
One of the things we're going to be introducing in the next couple of months is an apprenticeship scheme, so when we're taking on new staff, they’ll go through their training with us and they'll get their RHS qualification up to level one which we’ll be paying for as part of their qualification. Our ambition is to create a city of gardeners, and so for us it's not enough to just make these spaces. You have to get people involved and to look after them, to respect them and to continue the development of them.
