A community garden and ‘log cabin’ in Cwmbran are available for individuals and groups to use for things that will help people’s wellbeing.
RecoverED Wales is located in the bottom of the large car park of the Queen Inn in Upper Cwmbran. As you enter the car park you can’t miss the bright colourful mural on the side of a shipping container. The site is a mix of sheds, garden areas, seats, raised vegetable planters, and the cosy wooden ‘office’.
You pass a pair of battered wellies nailed to a fence that have been transformed into plant pots as you enter one outdoor area. Inside a shed is a stunning wooden dresser that’s been upcycled and rescued from landfill. And it’s hard to take your eyes off the old piano, once destined for the tip, that is now bright pink and turquoise and used as a planter with flowers and plants spilling out of the lid and over the keys. Sunk into the ground is an old bath but now a water feature that helps pull in wildlife with frogs, newts and robins enjoying life in this stunning corner of Upper Cwmbran.
I visited earlier this week and first chatted to Mark Richardson who is one of the people behind it all. The log cabin was built thanks to a £10,000 grant from the National Lottery’s Community Fund.
Already it’s used by a cross stitch club and as a base for a walking group. Someone has spoken to him about using the site as a base to support frontline NHS staff who were affected by Covid.
He told me that the areas are for “anyone” to use. People are welcome to get in touch to find out more and see how they can get help to start and grow.
Mark said: “We are building a community of people interested in doing something different with and for mental health and wellbeing. If there is somebody that wants to start and they haven’t got maybe the finances, then we wouldn’t charge for the cabin and we would help them to set that group up. If they’re stuck on how they would get funding for that group we would help them out as well.
“There are lots of things that we don’t know the community need and to some extent what we need to do is to say ‘look, you tell us what you want’ and that way it doesn’t mean that that’s what they get but it does mean we can begin to look at ‘how do we do it?’.
“My long-term aim and passion is that this place becomes a centre of learning, so not learning in the formal sense in that we have courses and education, but we learn about what it means in terms of community, in terms of sustainability, in terms of the things we can do we didn’t know about.
“It fits with the Queen Inn because it’s around sustainability and ethics. It’s around all those different things. I’m fed up seeing projects set up and claiming to meet the needs of the community when the community have said ‘that’s not what we want’.
“What’s missing is often ‘what do we put in place to kind of almost tease that out?'”
During my visit, I spoke to someone who uses the site and was told: “I love the fact that I can just be myself up here. I’ve been struggling with my mental health. I was shut away in my house. At first, I was up one day a week and now I’m here every day.
“The difference it’s made to my mental health is incredible. If there are things that we’re already doing that people want to take part in they can, or if there is anything new they want to come and do here, come and set it up. I’d be interested in trying out different groups if people want to set them up.”
