After a local disaster, Tayshan Hayden-Smith helps neighborhoods rebuild—with plants

National Geographic

18-03-2025

When Tayshan Hayden-Smith was growing up with his three siblings in London public housing, he dreamed of playing for Arsenal, the famous football club, and the family's small garden became his pitch. He honed his skills dribbling between his mother's rosebushes and lavender plants, his shots careening off her avocado tree. 'It was like the garden versus football,' he recalls. For a time, in the backyard and in his heart, football reigned supreme, and by the time he was 20, he was playing professionally in Austria.
Then, on a June evening in 2017, he got a text from his sister: a picture of Grenfell Tower, the housing project across the street from their home, consumed by flames. Seventy-two people would lose their lives due to the blaze, Britain's worst residential fire since World War II. 'All my friends were in Grenfell Tower and the surrounding area,' he says. 'That was the moment I decided that I wasn't going to extend my contract and I needed to be at home.'
When Hayden-Smith moved back to London, he sought to bring solace to his old neighborhood, North Kensington, and found inspiration in his mother's garden. An elevated highway known as the Westway runs through the community, and underneath it, in an area where street artists mingled with people seeking shelter, Hayden-Smith found a trash-strewn patch of soil. He and his partner began cleaning and planting it, and others joined in. 'It was a ready-to-go kind of garden,' he says. 'Just a blank canvas of a space with soil.' Local nurseries contributed plants—loads of geraniums and even a few palm trees. One resident decided to grow yams. For a neighborhood reeling from devastation, the little plot of land beneath the highway became a symbol of regrowth. Hayden-Smith and his friends named it the Grenfell Garden of Peace.