Above: Tuinstraat, Delft, in August 2022, more than fifty years after residents began reclaiming the street for planting, play and community life. “Woonerf de la Tuinstraat à Delft 21” by RdA Suisse (RdA-CH), via Flickr, licensed under CC BY 2.0. Cropped from the original.

In Delft in the early 1970s, residents took direct action against traffic on their street. What followed helped shape how Dutch streets are designed to this day. In London this summer, an 89 year old woman was told to remove the street garden she has tended for more than 25 years. The comparison raises a harder question than whether one council is right or wrong. When should an authority enforce the rules it has, and when should the rules change to recognise the value residents have already created?

Two groups of residents, separated by more than fifty years and several hundred kilometres, arrived at broadly the same conclusion. The space immediately outside their front doors was not working for the people who lived there. So they changed it, without waiting for a programme, a consultation or a form.

In both cases the result was something the neighbourhood valued. In both cases it also raised legitimate questions about permission, safety, access and who controls shared space. The interesting comparison is not between the residents. It is between the two official responses.

How should an authority respond when residents create something valuable outside the structures designed to manage public space?

Delft: from a blocked street to a national standard

Tuinstraat, or Garden Street, is a short residential street in Delft, roughly fifty metres long. In the early 1970s, as a new city traffic circulation plan took shape, drivers increasingly used it as a shortcut between two adjoining streets. Residents watched the space outside their homes become steadily more hostile to children.

The account most often repeated, popularised by Melissa and Chris Bruntlett in Curbing Traffic and now embedded in the international urbanism literature, is that residents took matters into their own hands. They installed obstructions, tore up sections of paving and planted trees, forcing any vehicle that entered to slow to walking pace. The municipality did not welcome it. It resisted.

It is worth being precise about what happened next, because the story is often told too neatly. The residents of Tuinstraat did not invent the woonerf. The term was coined by the urban designer Niek de Boer, who developed the concept during residential expansion at Emmen in the 1960s, and it was developed further in Delft by the municipal engineer Joost Váhl. A professional idea and a piece of resident direct action were moving in parallel.

What makes Delft significant is that the two met. Rather than treating the residents purely as a compliance problem, the city eventually accepted that they had identified a real failure in how the street worked, and the approach was refined, formalised and tested. By 1976 the woonerf had been written into Dutch national street design standards. Cars were not banned. They were subordinated. Today around two million people in the Netherlands live on streets designed on that principle, and the model has been copied internationally, including as the home zone in the United Kingdom.

The lesson is not that the authority was immediately enlightened. It was not. The lesson is that it eventually became willing to learn from what residents had understood about their own street. If you are interested in how planting becomes part of a street's social and civic infrastructure rather than decoration applied to it, that is the underlying mechanism.

London: a street garden, a bench and a removal notice

Hamilton Gardens is a cul-de-sac off Abbey Road in St John's Wood. Katharine Hoskyns, now 89 and a retired teacher, has lived there since the 1960s. When the council installed parking bays on the street, she and her sister-in-law Catherine began placing pots on a short stretch of pavement outside the house to offset the cars. That was more than 25 years ago.

There are now more than twenty containers, holding geraniums, tomatoes, herbs and a grape vine, along with a bench. Neighbours help maintain it. Neighbours also use it, and local musicians from the Abbey Road orchestra have long referred to the street as “The Pots”. A neighbour quoted by the BBC described it as a quiet oasis.

In July, Westminster City Council issued a notice requiring the removal of the bench and the pots. The council has pointed to a series of resident complaints over several years, along with reports of anti-social behaviour, dumped rubbish and drug taking around the bench, and said it was “reluctantly, obliged to begin a formal process”, while expressing hope of an amicable resolution. A camera was installed to monitor the area.

Katharine's family responded with a letter and a petition, organised by her son Nicky, which has gathered around 190 signatures collected in person. The removal deadline passed without enforcement. Following press coverage, council officers indicated they were pausing enforcement in order to reassess whether the garden is in fact the cause of the problems reported. As of writing, the matter is unresolved rather than concluded.

Why simply attacking the council is too easy

The reflex here is to cast this as a heartless bureaucracy versus a beloved 89 year old gardener. That is an enjoyable story and a fairly useless one, and it does not survive contact with the responsibilities a local authority actually carries.

Public footpaths have to remain usable by wheelchair users, buggy users and people with visual impairments. Heavy or unsecured containers can become hazards. Seating placed in the public realm carries liability. Reported anti-social behaviour cannot simply be waved away because the complainants are less sympathetic than the person being complained about. And public space belongs to everybody, not only to the person who starts caring for it.

Including plants in something does not place it above scrutiny. Not every informal street garden is safe, well maintained or appropriately sited.

But acknowledging that an authority has legitimate duties is not the same as accepting that removal is the only legitimate response. And in this particular case, the evidence for the standard objections looks thin.

Look closely and the objection is about the bench, not the planting

Read the council's own statements carefully and something becomes obvious. The specific harm identified is anti-social behaviour associated with people congregating on a bench. The remedy the council itself proposes is that the bench be moved. That is a coherent position, and it may well be the right one.

What is much less coherent is extending that to the removal of more than twenty pots of geraniums and tomatoes. A container of herbs does not attract drug taking. If the case rests on the bench, then the case is about the bench.

The obstruction argument is similarly weak on these facts. This is a short stretch of pavement in a cul-de-sac, leading to a single back door, with negligible through pedestrian movement. Katharine has said there is ample room for a wheelchair. Accessibility is a genuine and non-negotiable principle, and it should be measured rather than asserted by either side. But it is not obviously the operative issue here.

This matters because it exposes something that recurs whenever informal greening meets formal enforcement. Once a formal process begins, the intervention tends to be treated as a single indivisible object to be permitted or removed, rather than as a set of separate elements with separate risk profiles. The bench, the containers, their weight, their position and the behaviour of third parties in the vicinity are all different questions. Collapsing them into one produces a bad answer.

Address the problem without destroying the value

Once you separate the elements, a set of practical questions opens up that nobody needs to lose in order to answer:

• Can a minimum accessible route be measured, marked and permanently protected?
• Can containers be secured, repositioned, reduced in number or reduced in size?
• Can the bench be relocated, redesigned, replaced with seating less suited to prolonged congregation, or removed while the planting stays?
• Can maintenance responsibility be formalised, including succession, given the gardener is 89?
• Can the authority distinguish between problems caused by the intervention and problems merely occurring near it?
• Could the space become a recognised resident-managed area under licence, with agreed standards?

The principle is straightforward. Retain the value, identify the genuine risks, and adapt the intervention to address them. That last question about succession is the one both sides tend to avoid, and it is the one most likely to determine whether this garden exists in ten years.

Sometimes the initiative should change. Sometimes the rules should.

Rules governing footpaths and public space exist for good reasons. But most of them were written to prevent obstruction, limit liability and standardise maintenance. They were not written in anticipation of residents creating and sustaining valuable green space at their own expense for a quarter of a century.

So there are two possible directions of travel. Sometimes an initiative should change to comply with the rules. Sometimes the rules, forms and programmes need to change to accommodate a worthwhile initiative. A functioning system is capable of both.

Delft is instructive precisely because the authority eventually asked a different question. Not “which regulation does this breach?” but “what have these residents understood about this street that our system has missed?” That is not an argument that permission no longer matters. It is an argument that public administration should be capable of learning from what is already happening on the ground.

Why this is about more than attractive pots

I want to be careful here, because this is where arguments like mine usually overreach. Twenty containers on a London pavement do not deliver measurable urban cooling. They do not meaningfully manage stormwater. Anyone who tells you otherwise is damaging the case rather than making it.

What a single street garden can plausibly do is narrower and still substantial. It can give an older resident purpose, activity and daily visibility in her own neighbourhood. It can create a reason for neighbours to stop and speak. It can make a corner feel cared for rather than abandoned. It can provide forage for pollinators. And it can generate stewardship, the sense that this space belongs to the people who use it rather than solely to the authority that maintains it.

The larger environmental claims belong at a different scale. Multiply properly designed interventions across streets, estates, schools and business frontages and you begin to build something that genuinely contributes to canopy cover, permeability, habitat connectivity and street-level temperature. The individual pot is not the unit of climate adaptation. The network is. Which is exactly why the treatment of individual interventions matters so much.

Participation is normally the hard part

Anyone who has worked on urban greening knows what the recurring failure point is. It is not planting. It is not design. It is securing public acceptance, community participation, local stewardship, long-term maintenance and a sense of ownership rather than imposition.

Authorities spend considerable money and effort trying to manufacture that. Consultations, engagement programmes, community grants, planting days. The retention rate is often poor, because participation cannot easily be commissioned into existence.

So when residents are already initiating, funding, maintaining and defending green space of their own accord, something scarce is sitting in front of you. That does not mean every resident proposal must be accepted. It means the opening question should be “how do we make this work safely?” rather than “which rule lets us remove it?”

What a better response would look like

A workable sequence for any authority facing a resident-led intervention:

1. Identify the public value created. Record it before assessing the complaint, so it exists in the file.
2. Test whether the concerns are genuine, evidenced and attributable. Separate harm caused by the intervention from harm merely located near it.
3. Disaggregate the intervention. Assess each element separately rather than treating it as one object to permit or remove.
4. Agree responsibility. Accessibility standards, safety, maintenance and succession, in writing.
5. Formalise, trial and monitor before considering removal. Removal is the last option, not the default one.

The relevance to Ireland

It would be comfortable to treat this as a British problem observed from a distance. It is not. Irish towns and cities need more vegetation, greater community participation and stronger stewardship of shared space. We are also heavily dependent on predetermined programmes, formal application windows and standardised interventions.

Residents' associations, Tidy Towns groups, schools, businesses and individual citizens frequently see an opportunity before any council programme exists to meet it. At present the honest answer is that our systems are better at processing applications than at recognising initiative that arrives unprompted.

What would help is fairly practical. Clear published accessibility and safety standards for footpath planting, so residents know what compliance looks like before they start. Small-scale licences or permissions proportionate to the intervention. A default position of helping communities improve a proposal rather than refusing it. Temporary pilots with monitoring. And a mechanism for identifying successful local interventions and reproducing them elsewhere.

None of that is an argument for people appropriating public land without regard for anyone else. It is an argument for a system capable of recognising and supporting responsible community initiative when it appears.

Rules, or public value?

The residents of Tuinstraat were not attempting to influence international street design. They wanted somewhere safer and more sociable outside their front doors. The achievement that followed belongs at least partly to the authority, for eventually recognising that a piece of local defiance contained the beginnings of a better model.

Hamilton Gardens is a much smaller version of the same opportunity. Westminster's concerns deserve to be examined seriously, and the bench may genuinely need to move. But 25 years of unpaid care is also a form of evidence, and it belongs in the assessment.

When residents make a place greener, more sociable and more cared for, the question should not only be whether every rule was followed. It should also be whether our rules, forms and programmes are capable of recognising what those residents have made possible.

That is the wider Beyond Gardens argument in miniature. Horticulture should be judged not only by what is planted, but by the social, environmental, health and civic value it helps create, and by whether our institutions are built to see it.