Thursday morning 8 June outside the site in Moor Lane and volunteers were waiting for the galvanised steel pipes to be delivered.
The design called for 57 pipes, individually cut to size to provide the planters for the new garden.
Two lorries arrived, piled three pipes deep, but thanks to the wonderful team from MACE/Alandale from the 100 Moorfields construction site everything was safely unloaded and stacked on site. Volunteers included residents from the Barbican and Golden Lane estates and the Heron, Milton Court, together with graduates from the Architecture and Landscape Design MA, University of Greenwich.
Each pipe was anchored in place with a layer of aggregate, loaded bucket by bucket. It's amazing how heavy a 14 litre capacity bucket weighs filled with aggregate (about 25 kilos). And by the end of the day it felt far more! In total we shifted 10 jumbo bags of aggregate weighing about 17 tonnes and 13 bags of soil, all supplied by Bourne Amenity www.bourneamenity.co.uk
For the largest pipes, plastic buckets were placed on top of the aggregate to reduce the the weight and save on materials. Ten redundant bomb-proof street litter bins, together with 17 dustbins no longer required on Redrow's refurbished Blake Tower disappeared into the largest pipes.
The designers sorted out the placing of the pipes - in an amphitheatre along the back railings and curving round the edges of the site.
End of Day One, pipes in place and back row secured
