Spring!

The first bees appear on PlantLocks planted with a flowering crab apple tree & grape hyacinths.

BoxDocks & BinDocks appearing in Front Yards

More schools using PlantLock

Gainsborough school, Hackney, and Buckland Brewer school, Devon are some of the latest schools to take deliveries of PlantLocks for their school bikeparking. And ‘Ecoteachers of the Year’ from Summerhill & Cardinal Newman schools in Brighton & Hove’s Young Environmentalist of the Year Awards were presented with PlantLocks by Oliver Heath (interior designer & TV presenter).

Charlie Waterhouse writes:

In a world where domestic and civic design all too often delivers little more than idle affectation, the Front Yard Company's © PlantLock is a joy.

A mind-bogglingly undercomplicated invention, it simultaneously safeguards your bike, provides greenery and unclutters the house. Moreover, it encourages the use of that great British waste of space known as the front garden.

If embraced by urban planners, as it must surely be, the double whammy of parking and perking-up the locale can only encourage more people to ditch the infernal combustion engine.

Security, biodiversity, community and total-feng-shui rolled into one – who knew boron steel could be so brilliant?

Bugger bringing the Olympics to Britain. £3 billion would buy enough pre-seeded PlantLocks for 50 million bikes. Now that would be a properly meaningful contribution to the health of the nation.

International design collections must already be making space among the Eames and the Ives. The rest of us just need to move the wheelie bins.

Oh, those Front Yard people can help there too...

London Cyclist review PlantLock

"A fantastic, innovative product sure to put a smile on the face of cyclists and gardeners alike. Ideal for London pavements and gardens.” by Erin Gill. The conclusion of a good review of PlantLock in London Cyclist, magazine of the London Cycling Campaign.

PlantLock Planting Choices

• "Low maintenance, drought-tolerant"
• "Varied planting"
• "Rainfall-only planting"
• "For biodiversity"

Low maintenance, drought-tolerant

Hebes "Low maintenance, drought-tolerant"
 

For all year planting, we use Hebes, a delicate-looking but robust shrub with a dwarf habit. These are in leaf all year round, flowering at different times. Hebe Pinguifolia 'Pagei',
Hebe Pascal with reddish leaves in winter, Hebe Carl Teschner with more sprawling growth.

Until established, all plants need watering during dry spells.

Varied Planting

"Varied planting"

For varied planting, that requires occasional care through the year, PlantLocks have been planted with things as varied as strawberries, flowering crab apple trees, lavender, & herbs.

Autumn is the time for planting bulbs such as crocus, grape hyacinth & snowdrops, to come through early in the new year.

Spring & summer months can be any variety of annual flowers & perennials, & kitchen herbs such as thyme, marjoram & tarragon.

Rainfall-only planting

"Rainfall-only planting" (requiring the lowest levels of attention)

Sedums are hardy evergreen plants, with succulent, water-storing leaves. Often used for green roofs, sedums prefer poor, free draining soil. Plants are available as small seedling plugs or grown seedling mats. The following varieties are some that are suitable for PlantLock & the UK climate.

Sedum acre, album, album 'Athoum & 'coral carpet', spurium 'tricolour', 'fuldaglut',
& 'green mantle', sarmentosum, sexangulare and ewersii. These varieties are often available as a 'greenroof sedum mix' (Blackdown Horticultural, 01460 234582).

A mix of compost, sharp sand and crushed aggregate or gravel will drain well. 'Extensive growing substrate' is a formulated growing medium supplied in quantity (Shire Minerals, 01924 258509).

For Biodiversity

"For biodiversity"

Nearly all plants in flower will provide nectar for insects. But to really encourage and enjoy seeing butterflies, hoverflies, and bees, native flowers gives a food source and habitat uncommon in urban areas. A wildflower mix of seeds such as birds foot trefoil, fox and cubs, yellow horned poppy, small scabios, greater knapweed, & cornflowers.

Plants such as these may need watering through dry spells, and as annuals will die back in autumn.

Until established, all plants need watering during dry spells.

PlantLock for cafe customers.

Brill, the coffee, cake & record shop on Exmouth Market, has PlantLock for its cycling customers.

PlantLock with a transport bike

Here’s an unusual bike on a PlantLock in Hackney, East London.

Types of front

The groups of photographs on the right are the beginning of a typology of front yards. Things you might find in the front of houses – the facades themselves, the materials to be found there, the objects to be found there. More no doubt to be added. Surfaces of fronts. The materiality of the front. Is there a materiality of the house front yard? These pictures are not the answer to that question, but the beginning of one. Bootscrapers. Front yard ‘furniture’ from the days of horse manure. A virtually extinct need.

Front doors. A typology of entrances. Front yards are where the enclosure of home begins and the public world fades into the memory. The threshold. Fronts of homes.  A variety of home types with yards in front. Typologies of house & yard.

Fences, railings, walls & hedges. A variety of boundary markers or edges. Caste iron railings, wrought iron screens, picket fencing. Of course this is only a beginning – we need to add brick walls, stone walls and more hedges & fences. Dan & Ollie

Boot scrape

Contemporary front yard

Front Gardens or Front Yards?

We have been asked many times "Why use front yard" surely that's just an Americanism? Well, yes, North Americans do refer to the front yard and the back yard. But if we look at the history of the two words, garden and yard, we are doing anything but importing a word. We are in fact resurrecting the old English 'geard' the root of the word yard in the face of the old French 'gardin' – from whence garden. The point is that the contemporary urban front yard is not simply a garden – it has to perform a whole host of other functions – like storing wheelie bins and bicycles. This is not to degrade the cultivation – the gardening of the front yard, but helps us imagine a host of different arrangements for the space in front of our houses and flats. Not so long ago we used the space in front of our houses to demonstrate respectability – the tidiness of our privet hedges and so forth. A new respectability seems to be emerging, placing greater emphasis on our wit & acumen: our sustainable methods of transport, our recycling, our home grown tomatoes, and the vitality of our imagination.

Flood waters rising in the front yard

The flood waters that paralysed various parts of England in the summer of 2007 gave rise to a short but intense media graze over the causes. Climate change in its broadest sense was skewered as the chief culprit. As we climbed guiltily on board our 10 quid easyjet flights, many must have wondered what they could do about it. It's unlikely that un-concreting their front yards would have occurred to the guilt-ridden sky-riders. But that is exactly what some are suggesting. A London Assembly report published in September 2005, "Crazy Paving: The environmental importance of London's front gardens", claimed homeowners across the capital have paved over an area equivalent to 22 Hyde Parks to give them somewhere to put their vehicles. The growing tendency to cover front gardens means rainwater has no way of naturally seeping into the ground. Instead, it is channelled into the drainage system, which is already under pressure, increasing the risk of flooding during heavy rain. According to the London Assembly report, two thirds of the capital's front gardens are already partially covered by paving, concrete or gravel. A year earlier West London Friends of the Earth set up a campaign known as Front Gardens Matter drawing attention to the effect this was having, including, increased risk of flooding especially flash flooding, increased levels of pollution of local watercourses, increased air pollution (particulates), a dirtier environment, increases the local temperature, the effect on the diversity of plant and animal life, and the increased noise from traffic and other sources, especially at ground floor level. As is often the case, the balanced front yard - which might include a gravelled space for car & bicycle parking TOGETHER with more plants AND more effective recycling storage – is most likely to pave the way to the future of front yards. After all, nothing is set in stone.

Critical Mass

The last Friday of July was my first experience of taking part in critical mass. A few hundred cyclists, and a few inline skaters gathered on the Southbank below waterloo bridge at around 6pm. As I arrived I noticed a large police force also assembled, I began to imagine the event being a constant battle between cyclists and officers.

However, to my surprise, nothing could be further from the truth. When we finally got moving, at which point I was riding in the middle of the mass unable to see the head or tale of the procession. I was stunned by the sight at the first big junction – around London Bridge. A police officer – on a push bike – was placed at each exit to the junction blocking the traffic from passing while our slow moving parade past through all three colours of the traffic lights. By the end of the 3 hours I participated this just seemed normal. In fact I got a real shock when later cycling home and realizing that I didn't rule the road.

Towards the end of the night, as the rain that had started got heavier and numbers had dwindled. The police presence made up a substantial number (if not the majority) of the moving mass. I think they enjoy it.

Critical mass has no one individual at its head, it's a truly malleable entity. As me and two friends experienced when upon deciding to head home while the mass was stationary in Piccadilly Circus (with the help of the police calmly holding back all five lanes of traffic) we turned to see the whole precession loyally following our route.