I turned our rubbish-filled Manchester alleyway into a beautiful garden and I think others should try too
We met with Yasmine El-Gabry who with her neighbours has transformed her Moss side ginnel into a community garden.
She said: “We started in 2018 and it was because the alleyway was so full of rubbish that when we opened our gates we couldn’t get out.”
Adding: “I think 70 metres of it was literally rubbish. So fridges, mattresses, bin bags, glass. Everything you can imagine just filled the space.”
However, everything changed when a neighbour knocked on Yasmine’s door asking if she would be interested in helping clean it all up. Yasmine at first was unsure of the mammoth task ahead and whether it could ever be completed, but after she saw her neighbour working hard she knew she had to get involved.
She said: “I had lived here for a year at this point and had never met any of the neighbours so the fact that I was meeting people on both sides was really cool.”
Adding: “We cleaned up one little space and then it started working its way all the way down.”
The ginnel now has a table and chairs, vegetables growing and even some lovely lights overhead. Yasmine also explained how the council has given them funding through the neighbourhood investment fund, allowing them to get more plants, raised beds and compost.
Before getting involved in this project, Yasmine had barely looked after a house plant, but soon saw huge success online after working with her community and posting about her gardening work. Her Instagram account @mcrurbangardener now has 10.4K followers with some videos achieving over 1 million views.
She said: “It’s nice to know that there’s so many people who feel like we felt and that they just want to do something nice, but don’t know how to do it.”
Adding: “I get loads of messages from people across the country doing stuff which is crazy and in other countries as well like Australia. I think every little bit helps, both personally but our world more broadly too.”
To allow more people to be able to do this, Yasmine said: “I think in the future I’d really like to see councils support community groups a lot more and help people get started and make sure they’re not bogged down in admin.”
Adding: “I’d like to see that here but also everywhere, I think there’s a lot of space that we don’t utilise in a positive way and it makes it pretty.”