Take the Trail of Well-being

Fancy a bout of hysterics whilst harvesting broad beans? Or throwing some shapes whilst planting pumpkins on the station platform?

If the answer’s yes (and why the hell wouldn’t it be?) we recommend you pop along to Transition Kentish Town’s Trail of Well-being event this Saturday – where they’ll be celebrating the launch of three new bucolic community gardens off Kentish Town Road.

Highlights include a vogueish laughter yoga session at the new Well Beeing Garden (geddit?) at the James Wigg Practice (11am-12:30pm), now chocka with plants for bees and healing. Then from 1pm, there’s live choonage and nibbles at Platform 1 at Kentish Town station, filled to the brim with foxgloves and lupins, runner beans and roses. An homage, in fact, to old-fashioned cottage gardens.

Finally, from 3pm you can devour free tea and refreshments at the Listening Space Garden at the Caversham Group Practice, which opens its doors for the first time. It’s been designed to provide a space of refuge and healing for its patients, many who are victims of war and torture. This Saturday, however, it’s all about tucking into herby scones. Fair enough.

Camden Air Action, that local pollution busting group, will also have a stall outside the Co-op. “Air quality monitoring by the Green Party and local community groups,” says member Dee Searle, “has revealed that NW5 has some of the highest pollution levels in London, which have been linked with a wide range of health complaints.”

In fact, she says, locals have come to accept that our high street is “filthy, noisy, traffic-clogged and unhealthy.”

But it doesn’t have to be that way. “The Trail of Well-being,” she says, “is the first step towards re-envisaging Kentish Town as a cleaner, greener, welcoming public space that locals, visitors and businesses can enjoy – and to encourage all of us to work together to create long-term solutions.”

And you know what? It’s true, isn’t it? We actually don’t have to accept the thoroughfare as perennially noisy and traffic-clogged. Yay. Even better, there are plans for several mini “parklets” along the high street – perhaps even a “green corridor or fence to screen off the traffic”. Now that would be interesting.

Oh, and if you’re worried about finding the Trail of Well-being gardens this Saturday, watch out for green footprints which might appear overnight on Friday along Kentish Town Road.