Location
Sainsbury Wellcome Centre
Fitzrovia, Central London, W1
Core Goal
To transform the conventional roof-terrace planting into a productive herb garden that supports the Centre’s kitchen, advances its sustainable approach and creates new opportunities for employees to connect with nature.
Timeline
From three months of planning and planting to being able to use the full range of herbs by the Centre’s kitchen.
The challenge
The Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour has a series of roof terraces that provided attractive outdoor seating but offered limited seasonal interest or meaningful interaction with nature. We wanted to create purposeful spaces with a practical role in the everyday life of the organisation.
The Centre already takes a considered approach to food and sustainability. Its kitchen prepares fresh breakfasts and lunches each day, caters for corporate events and serves vegetarian lunches three days a week, alongside a daily selection of freshly prepared salads.
A productive herb garden was a natural extension of this ethos—bringing fresh ingredients closer to the kitchen while adding scent, flavour, biodiversity and purpose to the terrace.
The vision
Our vision was to create a living larder: a productive and attractive garden shaped around the needs of the people who would use it.
The herb garden would give the kitchen team convenient access to fresh, seasonal ingredients while supporting the Centre’s wider sustainability ambitions. It would also provide employees with a visible connection between growing, harvesting and the food served in their workplace.
Rather than treating the terrace as passive landscaping, we wanted it to become part of the Centre’s daily operations—a space that could feed people, support pollinators and encourage greater engagement with nature.
A co-creative approach
We developed the garden with the kitchen team, whose practical knowledge was central to deciding what to grow.
Together, we considered the herbs and edible plants used most regularly in daily menus, salads, garnishes, drinks and corporate entertaining. The planting plan balanced the kitchen’s requirements with the conditions of an exposed roof terrace, as well as the need for seasonal interest, resilience and biodiversity.
The garden included a varied selection of culinary herbs and edible plants, such as rosemary, sage, basil, thyme, oregano, marjoram, mint, chives, parsley, fennel, chillis, marigolds.
Flowering herbs and companion plants were incorporated to provide colour, scent and nectar for pollinating insects, ensuring the garden remained valuable even when individual plants were not being harvested.
The Grand Reveal
The project transformed a slightly neglected area into a practical kitchen resource which sat alongside the outdoor dining area for maximum visual impact.
Freshly harvested herbs can now contribute flavour, scent and visual interest to meals prepared on site, including daily lunches, salads and food served for corporate entertaining. This creates a tangible connection between the garden and the kitchen while complementing the Centre’s existing focus on fresh, vegetable-led food.
For employees, the garden makes the journey from plant to plate visible. It provides another reason to notice and explore the terrace, helping nature become part of everyday workplace life rather than something experienced only in passing.
The flowering herbs and edible plants also extend the terrace’s value to pollinators, creating additional sources of nectar and habitat within a highly urban environment.
Results at a glance
Client impact
“As a chef, it’s wonderful to be able to walk out of the door and collect fresh ingredients.
The kitchen staff make full use of the herb garden, collecting mint every morning to prepare the flavoured water in the bistro and crafting salads around the herbs that are growing on the terrace.
Fresh home-grown herbs have a much stronger flavour than shop-bought ones, so we don’t need as much and it tastes so much better!”