BY ASKA HAYAKAWA
“Growing A Garden Is A Beautiful And Radical Act”
On one end of Markfield Road, right on the corner, is one of the best pubs in London. Not many who have been, would argue against that statement, and the people at Time Out also seem to agree. Mannions Prince Arthur is a great little Irish pub which has been around since the mid-1800s, and you can still get a great pint of Guinness for under a fiver. This pub is a welcoming retreat located in between Seven Sisters and Tottenham Hale, and is a haunt for local regulars and many of the creatives whose studios are housed in warehouses in the nearby industrial estate.
On the other side of the couple minute walk to the other end of Markfield Road is Markfield Park. Markfield Park was created almost 100 years ago in 1929. Within its 20 acres there is a skate park, grass football pitches, children’s playground, an all-weather pitch suitable for netball, tennis and 6-a-side football, and a cafe. A little bit more surprising to find within the park is the Markfield Beam Engine and Museum. Housed in a grade II listed building, the 100 horsepower steam engine used to pump sewage from Tottenham out east towards Beckton. This piece of Victorian engineering ingenuity was commissioned in 1888, and the site played a vital role in local public health since the 1850s.
Markfield Road itself is home to a plethora of industries. In one such warehouse almost smack bang in the middle, half way up the road is Bones & Pearl, where the Crucible lab/office is situated. Our neighbours include photographers, videographers, tailors, music producers, many different kinds of artists, and even an environmental scientist. Our direct next door neighbour (who recently relocated to another space a couple of warehouses down) was the landscape gardening company Wild City Studio, whose work is particularly centered around community lead and focused projects. A project which was a couple of years in the making was to take over a section of Markfield Park that had been overgrown and neglected, and transform it into a community garden.
Wild City Studio had collaborated with the charity Centre for Mental Health to create ‘The Balance Garden’ for the 2023 edition of the Chelsea Flower Show, which showcased using repurposed materials, and innovative and affordable planting techniques. The inspiration was to encourage people to grow their own food. It blended natural beauty with urban charm, and allowed us to reimagine public parks and neglected spaces to see their full potential.
The Balance Garden was to be rehomed in Markfield Park, and the grand opening was held on the Saturday (14th September 2024) during the annual Markfield Road Festival. To celebrate this event, Stu was contacted by Jon from Wild City Studio, and we were tasked with creating a cocktail using a selection of some of the plants and fruits found in the garden.
We started mid-August, around 5 weeks before the launch of the garden. The many bramble shrubs were the perfect place to start. The blackberries were in peak ripeness, but would not remain so until the festival, so they were fermented in a simple lacto-fermentation process.
We would not have been able to use every ingredient grown in the garden to create a cohesive and balanced drink, so we opted for 7 botanicals to harmonise with the base of Tanqueray 10 gin and the fermented blackberries. We started with botanicals more familiar to us, such as wormwood and lemon balm, adding complex bitter flavours, and delicate citrussy notes respectively. There was a really interesting plant called artemisia abrotanum, which tasted a lot like cola. It provided a complex and multilayered sweetness, which paired nicely with the herbal licorice-like anise hyssop. Hawthorn berries gave a sharp, tart bite, and mugwort was grassy and vegetal with some flavours not too dissimilar to juniper. Finally, young fennel seeds provided a subtle anise flavour, complimenting the herbaceous anise hyssop and mugwort.
(The finished drink pictured with a local cat, Jackie – he’s great at catching rats in the industrial area of Markfield Road)
These plants were processed by infusing them into different alcohols and sugar syrup, and cooked at different temperatures. The resulting drink was in the style of spritz, and after balancing all the ingredients and diluting with water down to 9.5% abv the ‘Markfield Park Spritz’ was force carbonated with CO2. The cocktail was then decanted into Champagne-style bottles and capped. The fizzy beverage was the perfect way to take in a warm, late-summer evening, and to celebrate the great work done by Jon, Steve and the team at Wild City Studio.
The event was reflective of the strong community spirit around this part of North London, and an example of the ingenuity still around today in the literal shadow of the engineering masterpiece that is the beam engine.
Render of the community park
The finished drink pictured with a local cat, Jackie - he’s great at catching rats in the industrial area of Markfield Road
The legacy of The Balance Garden: boosting mental health in Tottenham
Markfield Park Community Garden
BY ASKA HAYAKAWA
“Growing A Garden Is A Beautiful And Radical Act”
On one end of Markfield Road, right on the corner, is one of the best pubs in London. Not many who have been, would argue against that statement, and the people at Time Out also seem to agree. Mannions Prince Arthur is a great little Irish pub which has been around since the mid-1800s, and you can still get a great pint of Guinness for under a fiver. This pub is a welcoming retreat located in between Seven Sisters and Tottenham Hale, and is a haunt for local regulars and many of the creatives whose studios are housed in warehouses in the nearby industrial estate.
On the other side of the couple minute walk to the other end of Markfield Road is Markfield Park. Markfield Park was created almost 100 years ago in 1929. Within its 20 acres there is a skate park, grass football pitches, children’s playground, an all-weather pitch suitable for netball, tennis and 6-a-side football, and a cafe. A little bit more surprising to find within the park is the Markfield Beam Engine and Museum. Housed in a grade II listed building, the 100 horsepower steam engine used to pump sewage from Tottenham out east towards Beckton. This piece of Victorian engineering ingenuity was commissioned in 1888, and the site played a vital role in local public health since the 1850s.
The restored Markfield Beam Engine
Markfield Road itself is home to a plethora of industries. In one such warehouse almost smack bang in the middle, half way up the road is Bones & Pearl, where the Crucible lab/office is situated. Our neighbours include photographers, videographers, tailors, music producers, many different kinds of artists, and even an environmental scientist. Our direct next door neighbour (who recently relocated to another space a couple of warehouses down) was the landscape gardening company Wild City Studio, whose work is particularly centered around community lead and focused projects. A project which was a couple of years in the making was to take over a section of Markfield Park that had been overgrown and neglected, and transform it into a community garden.
Bones and Pearl
Wild City Studio had collaborated with the charity Centre for Mental Health to create ‘The Balance Garden’ for the 2023 edition of the Chelsea Flower Show, which showcased using repurposed materials, and innovative and affordable planting techniques. The inspiration was to encourage people to grow their own food. It blended natural beauty with urban charm, and allowed us to reimagine public parks and neglected spaces to see their full potential.
Render of the community park
The Balance Garden was to be rehomed in Markfield Park, and the grand opening was held on the Saturday (14th September 2024) during the annual Markfield Road Festival. To celebrate this event, Stu was contacted by Jon from Wild City Studio, and we were tasked with creating a cocktail using a selection of some of the plants and fruits found in the garden.
We started mid-August, around 5 weeks before the launch of the garden. The many bramble shrubs were the perfect place to start. The blackberries were in peak ripeness, but would not remain so until the festival, so they were fermented in a simple lacto-fermentation process.
We would not have been able to use every ingredient grown in the garden to create a cohesive and balanced drink, so we opted for 7 botanicals to harmonise with the base of Tanqueray 10 gin and the fermented blackberries. We started with botanicals more familiar to us, such as wormwood and lemon balm, adding complex bitter flavours, and delicate citrussy notes respectively. There was a really interesting plant called artemisia abrotanum, which tasted a lot like cola. It provided a complex and multilayered sweetness, which paired nicely with the herbal licorice-like anise hyssop. Hawthorn berries gave a sharp, tart bite, and mugwort was grassy and vegetal with some flavours not too dissimilar to juniper. Finally, young fennel seeds provided a subtle anise flavour, complimenting the herbaceous anise hyssop and mugwort.
The finished drink pictured with a local cat, Jackie - he’s great at catching rats in the industrial area of Markfield Road
These plants were processed by infusing them into different alcohols and sugar syrup, and cooked at different temperatures. The resulting drink was in the style of spritz, and after balancing all the ingredients and diluting with water down to 9.5% abv the ‘Markfield Park Spritz’ was force carbonated with CO2. The cocktail was then decanted into Champagne-style bottles and capped. The fizzy beverage was the perfect way to take in a warm, late-summer evening, and to celebrate the great work done by Jon, Steve and the team at Wild City Studio.
The event was reflective of the strong community spirit around this part of North London, and an example of the ingenuity still around today in the literal shadow of the engineering masterpiece that is the beam engine.