Across London, privately owned developments and pseudo-public spaces have increasingly enforced boundaries on public life. This project responds to this by reclaiming brownfields in Hackney and Stratford, proposing a working botanical garden and scientific research institution that remediates these urban voids while returning them to public use.

The proposal leverages London's stalled construction sites as an opportunity to reclaim idle land, occupying it through community use, incremental building, and the establishment of ecological value that allows it to gain legal protections.

Situated beside an active railway, the project acts as an extension of a corridor whose embankments and habitats are among London's richest yet least visible ecologies. It mirrors yet interrogates the imperial legacy of Kew Gardens, inverting the concepts of the greenhouse and the archive by embedding them within an open landscape.

Conceived as a landscape in a constant state of making, the project refuses the logic of contemporary regeneration, reframing public space not as a managed amenity but as a collectively produced common and positioning architecture as a tool of resistance.