London National Park City Festival

Across the city, are quietly making their own neighbourhoods greener, healthier, and wilder. What each of them does is up to them, because they know what their area needs. Some are creating pollinator pathways. Some are taking people on Fungi Forays. Some are bringing outdoor learning to London’s school children. Some are campaigning for the Right to Grow. Some are protecting London's Rivers.

On Saturday 17 October, for one day only, they're bringing it all to one corner of Pimlico. This is the London National Park City Festival, and everyone is invited.

There are talks, workshops, walks and stalls from every corner of the city. A family friendly space and great food.

Early Bird tickets £5

A free copy of 12 Ways to connect with People & Nature in London

Access to The Marketplace - talks from Rangers, live podcast recordings, demo stalls showcasing London nature projects, family friendly arts and crafts zone and more!

2pm till 6:30pm

Add-on price - £7.50

A pop-up festival of live-action and animation films with their makers and causes from urban green spaces. Docs and shorts about nature and greening activities from personal stories and nature conservation to urban gardening, outdoor wellbeing, and campaigning. Through rare film screenings and thought-provoking talks, we explore these themes through the eyes of filmmakers and the everyday heroes of the city’s green spaces. Our work lies at the intersection of cities, filmmaking, and nature.

Various times throughout the day

Workshop add-on price - £25

1.5hr small group workshops led by experts in their field

Walk add-on price - £10

1hr walks including Fruity Walks, plant and tree folklore stories and more.

Saturday 17th October

Churchill Gardens Community Centre, Pimlico

A short walk from Pimlico tube

Most of all, there are people. The volunteers who make London National Park City real, in one place, for one Saturday. Come and meet them. Come and find out how to make London Greener, Healthier and Wilder.

Info: No fayre is complete without a bustling marketplace. The hall will be lined with a host of fantastic stalls and educational stands.

Info: Five different walks around the area. Themes: folklore, fruit trees, mushrooms, photo walk, and singing. Check "walks" to get more details.

Info: During the festival, we’ll be hosting a free activity corner in the hall which will offer all sorts of amazing opportunities to get your arts and crafts on. Check "free activities" to get more details.

Info: Three 1h30min workshops. Themes: mushroom growing, cyanotype printing, nature reportage. Check "workshops" to get more details.

Info: A lineup is stacked with some incredible speakers. Talks will be centred around five different themes; Community, Growing & Land, Rivers, Reuse & Repair, and Resilience. There’ll be three speakers for each topic, with some open discussion and question answering to keep conversations open and engaging.

Info: A pop-up festival of live-action and animation films with their makers and causes from urban green spaces. Docs and shorts about nature and greening activities from personal stories and nature conservation to urban gardening, outdoor wellbeing, and campaigning. Through rare film screenings and thought-provoking talks, we explore these themes through the eyes of filmmakers and the everyday heroes of the city’s green spaces. Our work lies at the intersection of cities, filmmaking, and nature. Check "London Nature Films Fest" to get more details.

Info: Join naturalist and urban guide Chris Collier for a one-hour walk uncovering the myths, folklore, and hidden histories woven into the common trees and plants growing around Churchill Gardens Estate. Expect tales of magic and faery feats, forgotten customs, and the extraordinary plant persons who have shaped how Londoners have understood the natural world for centuries.

Info: Led by Divya Herrero, urban fruit tree forager and founder of Fruity Walks, this one-hour guided walk invites you to slow down, look up, and completely reimagine your relationship with the trees we live alongside. Through story, observation, and a little foraging folklore, Divya will help you see your city through entirely different eyes – one fruit tree at a time.

Info: Join Mike from the London Fungus Network for a one-hour foray into the fungal world. Together you will learn to identify common mushroom species, explore the extraordinary role of fungi in the urban ecosystem, and discover why these often-overlooked organisms are some of the most important living things in the city. Please note: this walk is for educational purposes and is not a foraging course.

Info: A photo walk in and around the Churchill Gardens Estate using toy cameras as a means to see a built up area with fresh eyes. Everyone on the walk will have a camera to use that prints out small black and white prints as we go. The strong geometric forms of the estate’s architecture and the surprisingly varied flora ore perfect to explore with the high contrast prints that the cameras produce. At the end of the walk there will be the opportunity to stick the prints into a zine to make a small memento of the walk.

Info: Join Catherine Pestano for a joyful, communal walk through the green spaces around Churchill Gardens Estate.
Walking and singing have always belonged together – and this is your chance to find out why. Join Catherine Pestano for a joyful, communal walk through the green spaces around Churchill Gardens Estate, weaving song into the rhythm of the route. No experience needed, no performance required – just a willingness to open up, be present, and let the music change the way you move through the city.

Info: Learn to grow your own mushrooms using everyday household waste. Join Fat Fox Mushrooms for a hands-on workshop exploring the fascinating lifecycle of fungi and their vital role as nature's master recyclers. You’ll discover how mushrooms can transform materials such as used tea leaves and coffee grounds into nutritious food, and learn how to create a simple growing system at home using recycled materials.
Designed for beginners, the workshop will cover what mushrooms need to thrive, how to avoid common sources of contamination, and simple techniques for growing your own at home. Everything you need for the workshop is provided.
Booking required.

Info: Join Ranger and artist Mo Langmuir for a hands-on cyanotype printing workshop exploring our relationship with the natural world. Experiment with the technique on paper and fabric using pressed plants, found objects, cut-out text, reference images and your own drawings. You can also collect natural materials from the site to use in your work.
Everyone will leave with their own cyanotype print and a printed fabric bookmark, featuring their own collaged exploration of the relationship between people and nature.
Booking required.

Info: Join Ranger Giuseppe for a photography workshop exploring how we can document and share the natural world while respecting the nature we are photographing. Through storytelling and reportage, you’ll explore what it means to photograph nature and biodiversity thoughtfully, from taking the time to understand your subject to paying attention to light and taking a slower approach.
A chance to think differently about nature photography and how we can use images to tell stories, share knowledge and encourage a deeper connection with the natural world.

Info: A community garden in London sits in the shadow of an imposing Victorian Pr*son. The film charts their history and their hopes for the future.

Info: A vignette of the quietly unassuming, but busy urban gardener. From calming the mind, to healing our bodies or even feeding our communities; four individuals see guerilla gardening through their own lens.

Info: In a tale of derring-do reminiscent of Bollywood action films, and inspired by the style of Indian miniature painting—albeit on a grand scale—this work tells the story of Western Australia’s endangered animals reaching out to Bollywood miscreants for help in the face of environmental destruction.

Info: Leaves of London is a short documentary project by journalist and writer Joshua Geer, exploring the emotional relationships people form with trees in an urban environment. Set across London, a city home to an estimated 8.4 million trees, the film reflects both the vast scale of the capital’s urban forest and the deeply personal meanings individual trees can hold in everyday life. The film unfolds through four intimate stories, each centred on a single tree and the person who returns to it, revealing the quiet but powerful connections between people, place and nature in the city.

Info: ‘Earthly’ follows the actions of a group of female farmers at the organic farm Perkuus at the border of Brussels with the countryside. Their physical, calm and repetitive work stands in contrast with the faster and busier sounds coming from the city.
The farmers experience pressure to produce both quality and quantity and while this pressure gets transferred unto the land, they are also searching for ways to loosen their grip where possible, to leave space for natural processes by avoiding pesticides, practicing patience and finding more gentle methods to work the earth. Meanwhile the sun is quietly causing a very dry season.

Info: We often hear things like sexuality, gender roles and family structure discussed against the standard of ‘Natural’ by media figures, politicians, and people we know. But what does ‘Natural’ even mean? We take a closer look and find the truth might be a lot queerer than expected.

Info: Beginning with the shock of a trodden-on puffball, we journey across a field in Cornwall through plant stories, wild working-class autobiography, colonial botanies and more-than-human entanglement. Shot whilst crawling on my belly across an unremarkable field, the whole body becomes camera: a macro lens pushed so close that bugs, buttercup and pollen enter the lens housing itself, collapsing the distance between filmmaker and ground. At last, the plants are not the backdrop — they are the ones letting us in.

Info: Interbeing is an experimental short film visualising the unseen complexity and constant activity of the mycorrhizal network beneath our feet. Using a combination of intricate cinematography and data-driven animation, the film provides an insight into the miniscule world of mycelia through digital and organic means. The work emerges from Thich Naht Hanh’s Buddhist philosophy of ‘Interbeing’, everything in existence is connected, ‘to be, is to inter-be’. The soundtrack, created by Bradley Cartmell, is composed of MIDI data and EMF frequencies collected directly from plants and fungi, converting hidden activity into an immersive sonic experience.

Info: Visit almost any city and you will likely notice pigeons with deformed or missing feet. Rock Dove follows the efforts of a group of dedicated volunteers who meet on Sundays to catch pigeons and painstakingly remove the string and hair from their feet. The film focuses in on the hands of these "de-stringers" as they patiently carry out this act of care across the species divide.

Info: In the centre of a rapidly moving city, an urban farmer teaches us what it means to slow down. Set within a community farm, the film explores how South Asian growing, cultural memory, and collective care create a space of belonging, while also speaking to the deeper questions of food justice in the city.

Info: In a neighborhood transformed by gentrification and loss of green space, a backyard becomes a sanctuary and a teacher – alive with creatures who ask for nothing more than a place to live. Through seasons of change, Becoming Wild explores how beauty survives—when we choose to nurture it—and how ordinary people can help rebuild the natural world right where they live.

Info: The Hispering dissembles and reassembles how the world speaks to us and what happens if we listen. It contains meadows, oceans, fairytales and the whisper of unseen creatures. A sequence of prose-poem like glimpses slip between dream, waking and storytelling; the pervasiveness of water; and being-birthed and birthing are seeded in every word written and read.

Info: From above, the Althäuser lake looks like a ordinary quarry lake in the Karlsruhe area. However, its inhabitants turn the lake into a gem. Turtles live here, rare freshwater shrimp frolic, bizarre microorganisms hide, and predatory fish with fearsome teeth lurk.

Info: An ode to the remarkable variety of life in the Hudson Valley, "The Nature of Nature" celebrates the living fabric of this unique landscape. From high elevation forests to the globally rare tidal marshes along the Hudson estuary, the film captures the beautiful, the complex, the familiar, and the unknown…guided by the plants, animals, and people that call the Hudson Valley home.

Info: Did you know you can grow your own vegetables in a snail shell?
Join Ranger Katie from Let's Grow Brent to learn how to make seed snails – a brilliant, no-dig way to grow food in the smallest of spaces. You will make your own snail and leave with the seeds and know-how to start growing peas, chillies, peppers, or tomatoes at home. Along the way, Katie will share how she has helped grow food and build community across Brent – and why getting your hands in the soil changes everything.
No booking needed. Drop in anytime between 11:00 and 12:30.

Info: A community-powered repair hub designed to fix broken household electronics, reduce electrical waste, and teach practical repair skills.

Info: Join Sarah Carlin for a free, joyful painting session using natural objects and materials collected from the park. Discover the power of using what you find around you to make something genuinely beautiful. Open to kids and adults alike; no experience needed, just a willingness to make a mark.
No booking needed. Drop in anytime between 12:30 and 14:30.

Info: Join Eleanor from Wild South London for a free drop-in session combining nature journalling and zine making – a chance to observe the natural world around you and turn it into something you can take home. If you have been on the Toy Camera Photowalk earlier in the day, you will also have the opportunity to design and create a zine from your images.
Wild South London is a community group dedicated to helping people experience and learn about nature, biodiversity, and conservation.
No booking needed. Drop in and stay as long as you like.

Info: Doug Shaw's project Nature on Your Doorstep was created to encourage his local community to engage more actively with the nature in their neighbourhood. Through photography, creative writing, nature walks, and other art forms, Doug records and logs nature sightings across the London Borough of Sutton.
His work is on display throughout the festival day. Come and be inspired to notice the nature on your own doorstep.

Event venue & nearby stays

Churchill Gardens Residents Hall, Churchill Gardens, London, United Kingdom

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.

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