Mushrooms, microgreens and honey bees: Welcome to Wimbledon’s Rooftop Farm
Plus: Art exhibitions, pub quizzes and mocktail masterclasses to kick off your new year
Good morning Wimblers — welcome back. How have we been? I hope that everyone has had a lovely break. Thanks to everyone who has shared our newsletter over the holidays and to those who have just subscribed. As of this week, we’ve hit 4k followers thanks to you! Keep up the good work and keep sharing our newsletter so we can reach even more SW19 residents.
Things are slowly returning to normal here in Wimbledon. This week, you can expect your local news snippets, some great recommendations for the upcoming week and a property of the week that’s actually under £1 mil for a change.
Now that we’re back, please do get in touch — drop us a line here or leave a comment to let us know what you’re hoping to see from the Wimble in 2025. We’ve got big plans in store…
News snippets 🗞️
🏆 Rebecca Clark, a 20-year-old Wimbledon resident, has been awarded a medal by the King for her services to Young People with Disabilities and Autism. Rebecca’s incredible achievement comes after her tireless voluntary and advisory work, particularly for the national charity Ambitious about Autism. The Palace says she has “also contributed to disability policy, submitting evidence to the disability access youth select committee and speaking about her lived experience to over 400 people.” Thank you, Rebecca, for being a credit to Wimbledon! Read more about her fantastic work here.
🏡 Wimbledon has been named as one of London’s top areas to buy a property before new legislation reverting the stamp duty to previous levels on April 1. My London wrote that “Everyone adores Wimbledon, renowned for its prestigious tennis club and beautiful green parks, so it's no surprise the neighbourhood has made it onto the list. But … there’s much more to SW19 than this.” Click here to see what the paper considers to be our unique selling points.
☕️ The Fire Station Café is set to open on January 13. The new café, located inside Wimbledon Quarter on Queen’s Road, will also offer a new “Café Coworking” membership for £30 a month. This deal includes access to the coworking space as well as complimentary teas, coffees and pastries throughout the month. I’ll be popping in after its launch so swing by if you’d like to say hello!
Property of the week 🏠
This two-bedroom flat is all about levels — or at least that’s what I’m getting from the photos. Just look at that open plan living room / kitchen / dining room space with its cute, tiny fireplace and bookshelf that touches the ceiling. Both of the bedrooms are spacious (one of them even opens out into the garden) and that bathroom is straight out of Architectural Digest. So what’s the catch? Well, no catch, really … only that this flat will set you back a clean £750,000. Still interested? Check out more photos here.
The Wimble’s to do list 🎨
🖌 The Koppel Project’s Artist-led Exhibition: “194 The Broadway embodies potential. Closed for what feels like five, maybe seven years, it carries the traces of its past lives — a tailor’s shop, a corner store — and now serves as a gallery and artist residency space.” These are the words written by artists Natasha Brown and Francesco Felletti on the website introducing their new Wimbledon-based art exhibition. 194 The Broadway is expected to eventually transform into a block for offices and/or apartments, but in the meantime it has metamorphosed into a residency and exhibition that makes us look inwards and ask ourselves: If art is good for the community — and it is — who, then, constitutes the community? The exhibition is open to members of the public via appointment: hellowiggleroom@gmail.com.
Where: 194 The Broadway
When: Friday 13 December - Sunday 15 January
🍴 Ladies Before Lunch: The holidays might be over, but that doesn’t mean the social season has come to an end. Ladies Before Lunch is back for its usual monthly get togethers. The activity is FREE, though refreshments and snacks are available for a small charge at the Guild’s cafe. Head here to book your space.
Where: Wimbledon Guild Lounge
When: Tuesday 7 January, 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
💸 Cash for Coronets: Transatlantic Trailblazers of the Gilded Age: The Arts Society Wimbledon is kicking this year’s lecture series off with a bang. Get yourself down to The Sacred Heart Church for Mark Smith’s lecture about how 454 heiresses swapped their bright American dollars for fusty old European titles during the height of America’s gilded age. The result was a reinvigorated aristocracy and a legacy that speaks volumes about America and Britain’s “special connection”. Tickets are free for members and are £10 for non-members — grab them here.
Where: The Sacred Heart Church Hall
When: Wednesday 8 January, 8:00 PM - onwards (also on Zoom)
🍻 Pub Quiz at The Rose and Crown: Quiz Master Duncan is back and setting the tone for 2025 with another classic pub quiz. Grab your cleverest friends (let’s hope their intellects haven’t been dulled by the mire of Christmas festivities), wrap up warm and head into the village. See you there!
Where: The Rose and Crown
When: Tuesday 7 January, 7:30 PM - 10:45 PM
💧 Try January: Alcohol-free Masterclass at Amathus: This is one for all of you abstaining from booze this month. Amathus in the village is very kindly hosting a mocktail masterclass next week for all those wanting to learn how to make great non-alcoholic drinks. Tickets are £30pp.
Where: Amathus, Wimbledon Village
When: Thursday 9 January, 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
Photo of the week 📸
Thank you to Sally Gibbons for this hilarious photo of the week! In her email, Sally wrote “I think I shall have to make the effort to witness this for myself.” I couldn’t agree more, Sally.
Keep ‘em coming: zak@thewimble.com
‘It’s not like a 9 to 5. You can’t just tell the mushrooms to stop growing’: In conversation with Wimbledon’s Rooftop Farm 🧺
For your first Wimble of 2025, we thought it would be nice to focus on a piece about growth — and what better representation of growth is there than farming. Wimbledon Quarter’s Rooftop Farm has been steadily producing microgreens, gourmet mushrooms and honey since 2022. Located in the heart of Wimbledon, it is another example of this growing trend of urban farming. This week, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Will Murray, manager of the Rooftop Farm, to talk about everything from pink mushrooms to the need for more urban farms across the country.
Let’s go back to the beginning: When did you take over the Rooftop Farm?
So, I started working at the Rooftop Farm in December of 2023. The farm was an interesting change for me. I originally studied model making at university and worked for many years as a designer and an installation artist. Then I decided to retrain in horticulture and became familiar with growing and gardening. But I’m also really into food, so it was a nice pairing of those two passions, really. Jess, who joined the team this October, is part-time like me. Jess also works for the Bingham Riverhouse in Richmond who we supply our mushrooms to. But mushrooms were new to both of us when we started at the farm.
So you were essentially working alone for a year before Jess joined?
Yes, exactly. We work with a limited time frame at the Rooftop Farm and you’re wearing every hat trying to sort out both the organisation of the garden as well as the admin. It can feel a bit overwhelming at times, so having Jess there, even just to bounce ideas off, is so much better. And I’m hoping that as the farm grows, so does our team. Working in a city but on a farm is a unique thing; it’s not like an office job or a 9 to 5. You can’t just tell the mushrooms to stop growing. You’re also working with a longer process — things develop at different times.
And what exactly have you grown on the farm this past year?
All year round we do our great Grey Oyster Mushrooms, and in the summer we’ll try to offer a unique variation like Pink Oyster Mushrooms, though they can be a little fussier and have a limited growing window. We also grow herbs, salad crops, edible flowers and — because we have the bees up there — we also have a variety of other plants to be pollinator friendly. One thing we’ve started doing is pea shoots and other microgreens. For us, it’s quite hard to grow traditional root vegetables like carrots, for instance, because of how long they take to grow.
What makes urban farming so unique, especially in London?
Firstly, we don’t have our own soil. We buy our compost and import it in. Our job is to replicate and reproduce the environment you see in woodlands and forests. That’s easier with mushrooms because they adapt and grow incredibly well. We’re quite lucky here in Wimbledon because we can use all of the excess coffee grounds from the Quarter to help with our soil. For all of the other plants and greens, it’s really just a question of bringing in the right soil. Ideally, as time goes on, we would want to get all of our compost in the form of waste products from the local area (the Quarter) to eliminate buying anything in. I think that would make us even more sustainable. There are lots of spaces like ours popping up over London so hopefully we can see urban farming take off more and more.
Do you think people are increasingly conscious of sustainability and where their produce is from?
People seem genuinely interested in sustainability. That’s also why we’re launching our subscription boxes this year — which will be our first time directly supplying the public with fresh produce. The idea is to open the farm up a bit more to the public with tours, newsletters and accessibility to what we grow.
Going forward, we want to try out some new plants this year and see what works. There are options. We have this one idea to grow some Marigold leaves which are sort of like salad leaves meets spinach but with a unique flavour. It’s important that we grow interesting and different things. There’s no point in us growing plants and herbs that you can just buy in Tesco for cheap. By growing distinctive plants and vegetables, we add value to our work.
Rooftop Farm Boxes will soon be available to purchase from the Fire Station Café.
Question of the week 🔍
Before Christmas, I asked you which famous founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood attended King’s College School. The answer: Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Q: Which famous keyboardist and co-founder of The Style Council was born in Wimbledon?
You’re up to date 👋
Thank you to everyone who read this week’s newsletter. We’re slowly getting back into the rhythm of things as Wimbledon emerges from its holiday season slumber; we’ll be back with our usual Thursday newsletters next week. Please do get in touch in the meantime with any feedback. Pop over your photos of the week and comment below if you have any ideas for upcoming stories. I think that’s all for now. Oh, and don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already!