About this Event
With herbs, seeds and spices as our guides, participants will reflect on the qualities, uses, and journeys of non-native plants found in the landscapes of east London, considering how plants carry stories of migration, belonging, and cultural exchange.
Facilitated by community herbalist, Rasheeqa Ahmad, we will have space to share plant knowledge through discussion and herbal tea blending. Next, artist Shan Denney will guide us through botanical cyanotyping, a printing process using sunlight to capture the intricate forms of plants and seeds.
This is a free event, tailored in particular to those with lived experience of migration. No plant or herbal experience required and all materials will be provided. We will have homemade herbal teas and refreshments and participants will receive a small herbal gift, alongside their cyanotypes to take home with them.
If you are able, please bring along a plant, seed or spice from your kitchen which matters to you (which holds a memory, a recipe or a medecine) to share with the group.
The event will take place on the First Floor Galleries at UCL East Marshgate.
Biographies:
Rasheeqa Ahmad (Hedge Herbs) is a medical herbalist in her community in Walthamstow in north London. She has been practicing since 2012, offering treatment with herbal medicine and teaching about its many aspects, alongside a wider mix of work whose aim is reconnecting us as communities with the potential of this knowledge and craft as a way to support healthier living systems and relationships. She is inspired by her early involvement with the Radical Herbalism Gathering in exploring how to make plant medicine accessible and restore balance to its practice in the contexts of systemic inequalities and oppressions that are part of our shared histories.
She is part of Community Apothecary Waltham Forest in her locality, a social enterprise that brings community members together around a patchwork of medicinal herb gardens where they can learn about growing and making medicines together, exchanging knowledge and peer support and seeding the model in other neighbourhoods so that we create landscapes of healing everywhere! She was also a co-founder of the Mobile Apothecary in Bethnal Green, a street medicine distribution project bringing solidarity herbal healthcare to people from rough sleeper and less well resourced communities there.
Shan Denney is a multimedium artist, facilitator and bebe herbalist based in East London Creature creator and nature lover, combining mindfulness and eco-education with arts and crafts. I keep my workshops open and playful as I use a trauma informed approach towards facilitating an environment of healing and artistic exploration. My main practice is in sculpture and fabrication, however with 10+years of experience in art departments and workshop facilitation I have worked across a broad range of artistic practices.
Organised by:
Elsy Gomez Campos is a pharmacist, author and public speaker, founder of UK Black Pharmacist Association. She is currently completing her PhD at UCL and as a Churchill Fellow exploring racism within Ph*rm*cy.
Helene Schulze is completing a PhD in urban seed systems, colonial botany and border politics exploring the seed saving and sharing practices of migrant and diaspora growers in London as a form of grassroots biocultural conservation. She is also part of the collectives stewarding the London Freedom Seed Bank and Garden of Earthly Delights, Hackney.
This event has been developed by UCL PhD students on the Creative Engagement Fellowship: a training programme exploring creative approaches to community engagement. It forms part of a series of events responding to the themes of Common Ground, an artwork by the artist James Berrington on show at UCL East Marshgate from 3 Mar - 9 Apr 2026.
The full Common Ground events programme, including further events developed by the Creative Engagement Fellows, can be found here.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
UCL East - Marshgate, 7 Sidings Street, London, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
