The good life for everybody

The De Frene Road Market Garden, in south-east London, is a community-led, mental health project. Will Hatchett sees it as a model for a potential network of mini-utopias

In 2025 an episode of depression resulted in a highly significant change to my life. Social prescribing led me to a one day a week, one-year placement in a community market garden in south-east London. The experience was transformative. 

From the outset, De Frene Road looked great to me. The market garden occupies a half-acre plot surrounded by suburban houses. Within this space are squeezed fruit trees, raised beds, bee hives, a chicken run, a clay oven, green houses, a pond, a willow tunnel and a meeting space. 

Run by volunteers, on behalf of a charity, De Frene Road is a sanctuary and a place of beauty. The market garden offers some products, such as cut flowers, for sale, but that is not its primary purpose, neither is self-sufficiency; its main job is to help people whose mental health, for whatever reason, is challenged. It’s the good life – for everybody.

The new user is not confronted by a forbidding list of rules. The project’s ethos is unspoken and has developed over a long time – equality and value-free human interaction which does not label people and makes no demand on them other than voluntary participation. The food is vegan. The garden’s practices are designed so that they would not alienate a person from any religious or cultural tradition.

De Frene does not immediately present itself as a therapeutic environment. In my opinion, it offers a practical version of a utopia – a glimpse of what life should and could be like for all of us.

Faith, hope and beauty

One of the first things the visitor will notice is god’s eyes – pendants of brightly coloured wool, some fading, hanging in the trees. These are votive offerings and tools for prayer made on spindles of twigs, commonly found in South American countries in which indigenous beliefs co-exist with Catholicism.

They are expressions of faith, hope and beauty, not incongruous in a world that has become, in our so-called New Age, re-sensitised to nature and to pre-Christian beliefs. Subliminal, ambiguous, they are part of the magic that suffuses the plot. De Frene unlocks creativity, for most of us buried and discouraged since school. Creativity, providing purpose, is a prerequisite of happiness. Humans deserve no less.

De Frene Road packs a lot into a small space and is organised to help the maximum number of people, of all ages. Its vibrant colours and scents stimulate the senses, while the craft making, preserving of fruits and planting of next year’s seeds that go on in its sheltered spaces awaken memories, both of our own childhood and of a human childhood – the pre-industrial past that is just beyond the touch of memory, when south-east London was cloaked by the greenwood, hay meadows and open farmland. 

This connection requires no thought or intellectualising; it is a magical process, an alchemy, that comes life when one walks up a sloping path between the bay-windowed 1930s houses of an ordinary sreet, crosses the threshold and enters the plot.

Non-invasive horticulture

This kind of horticulture is non-invasive. Practised with the help of a poly tunnel and raised beds, it doesn’t use chemicals to fertilise soil or kill pests; often stray, self-seeding plants are left in beds for their beauty or pollinator value. 

The garden is neat and orderly. But it has plenty of habitats for insects – formal and informal bug hotels. Salvaged materials wait for re-use – synchronicity will provide the right piece at the right time for a DIY build.

De Frene Road’s mature apple trees, and one pear, survivals from the plot’s original use as allotments, provide its main character – a sylvan glade. It’s a return the past, because, as evidenced by street names – Perry Vale, Pearfield Road – the local area was once famed for fruit production.

Has post-scarcity anarchism, the hippy dream of the 1960s, actually arrived and will AI, rather than representing an existential threat, actually drive it – freeing humans from repetitive tasks, like writing up dull meetings and formulating crisp action points? 

Those who propose revolutions are normally utter pessimists – every technical innovation is a threat or will only benefit the rich; it’s never the right time to rebel – the agents of change must patiently wait for the next instruction or piece of correct language to be handed down from Revolution HQ.

A quiet revolution

I beg to differ. I think that a revolution is quietly happening in our midst. There is a growing network of community gardens and orchards in every large city – different versions of self-help communities. Some are attached to parks, museums and libraries that were stripped of funding by the post-2008 austerity programme and found that they could only function by using volunteers.

It’s a fair bet that virtually all of this new social infrastructure conforms to the practice of sustainability. Adaptive humans, without being told to do so, have created local, communal responses to diversity destruction and global warming throughout our towns, cities and conurbations. 

In terms of ‘mental health’ isn’t it possible that the diagnostic acronyms increasingly attached to people are offshoots of an industrialised, over-segmented, medical model, based on the physical capital of specialised ‘units’? To think is to be ontologically challenged; we all have mental health issues, don’t we? Surely holistic responses are best.

A modest proposal

How about we all spend a day a week turning car parks into orchards, with wildlife ponds; growing stuff that we need – not on our own land, but communally-owned spaces, suburb by suburb, street-by-street? It would be a true form of care in the community. What’s the worst that could happen? People would smile more. Boundaries would blur.

Would this obviate the need for psychiatric services – no, of course not. But such a network of mini utopias would increase the sum total of human wellbeing and make the physical environments that we inhabit, in cities, productive and beautiful. 

Beneath the cobbles is a beach. Other futures are possible. In every skip is a summer house. Why shouldn’t every community have a De Frene Road, or, at least, an adapted locally fit-for-purpose version? 

I wrote some poems during my eye-opening year and discovered that other service users liked to draw and paint. The result was a collaboration, producing an illustrated publication. The poetry collection Mind Healer can be purchased, with all proceeds going to Sydenham Garden, the charity that runs De Frene Road.

Renters’ rights – logical evolution or ‘mutant layer cake’?

This year could stand as a watershed in post-war housing policy on rented housing, moving towards a fairer, healthier sector. But that’s not a given. The reforms add hard-to-interpret additions to already complex law and impose multiple new duties on cash-strapped councils. Will Hatchett reflects

A national conference, RHE Global’s Housing 2026, could not have been more topical. The event was well-timed because the Renters’ Rights Act, which will give private rented sector tenants greater security of tenure in England and aims to improve the often below standard conditions in which they live, is now close to coming into force.

It could come to be seen as a milestone in a policy area that has yo-yoed between the ideologies of the two major parties since 1945. But only if it succeeds.

The act will be deemed successful if it protects tenants and improves housing standards while not causing the landlords’ flight from the private rented sector that has been warned of by their representative bodies. If those things are the case, the RRA will enjoy longevity and attract bi-partisan support. 

Failure could be, well – very bad. The UK has created a toxic tenure pattern under successive governments – increasingly inaccessible owner occupation, vestigial social renting and expensive and insecure private renting. If small landlords do leave the PRS en masse, because of the act, already stretched services could be overwhelmed by homelessness. Meanwhile, lower-tier tribunals already clogged with work could buckle under the weight of new cases, leading to even lengthier and expensive delays both for landlord and tenants.
There is a great deal at stake.

End of no-fault eviction

Let’s not be pessimistic or apocalyptic. The abolition of no-fault eviction for controlled tenancies has been long fought for and almost universally welcomed. Lobbyists have sought, in England, a central register or database of landlords for decades; we now have one – and it could provide a gateway, ultimately, to a passport-style system of landlord licensing. Housing campaigner Kwajo Twenoboa reminded the conference that you need a licence to drive a car, but not to be a landlord and he pointed out: “It’s easier to become a landlord than to open a chicken shop”.

The act contains a welcome duty to enforce (with the caveat that imposing a civil penalty of £7000 on an otherwise co-operative landlord simply for not producing a document by a required date could be counter-productive). 

Speaker Linda Selvy-Cobb, principal manager of DASH Services, welcomed the profile that the RRA has given to housing enforcement within local authorities. But awareness of the act among landlords, tenants and the general public is low. The Government has not seen fit to publicise the new law very widely, putting the onus on councils to do so.

There are also loopholes. Lettings agents – currently gate keepers for the most vulnerable – remain in a shocking void of unaccountability. The worst are deaf to tenants’ concerns and, through negligence, can incur life-changing penalties and liabilities for landlords.

The new legislation has introduced a welcome ombudsman for private tenants, but the service fails to cover tenants in temporary accommodation in the PRS. Both failings could be corrected by secondary legislation or private member’s’ bills. 

Need for regulatory discretion

Critics of the RRA point out that, from 1 May, EHOs will have powers to award significant civil penalties to landlords, while the legal underpinnings of the act will only just have come into force. Some landlords are going to say: “I didn’t know anything about this”. The National Residential Landlords Association called for at least six months of preparation time between the publishing of final regulations and the law coming into force. The measure was not adopted. In the absence of a period of grace, it will be up to councils to educate and motivate landlords and to enforce fairly, to avoid accusations of ‘penalty farming’. 

Older EHOs will remember New Labour’s Enforcement Concordat of 1998 and the Regulators’ Compliance Code of 2008. Both urged a ‘light touch’ and the use of enforcement only as a last resort. They may wonder how this aligns with RRA’s duty to enforce. 

Legal expert and former head of public protection and strategic director, Tim Everett, reminded delegates that there are fashions in enforcement culture. He said that stretched resources mean that a light touch would now be regarded an unaffordable luxury by most local authorities. He urged councils to adopt a single enforcement policy covering all of their regulatory services, as the best way to avoid successful challenges in courts and lower-tier tribunals.

Bonanza for lawyers

In designing a rational housing system, no-one would start from where we are now. Conference speaker Suzanne Smith, a small landlord and legal expert who has written a lay person’s guide to the RRA, aptly described housing law as a “mutant layer cake”. Successive governments have alternately stripped away or added protections for tenants.

Those adding them have not repealed previous law (limited Parliamentary time and five-year Parliamentary terms don’t allow that). Consequently, we now have the RRA while sections of the Protection of Eviction Act of 1977 and the Housing Acts of 1985, 1988 and 2004 remain in force; legal remedies are available through civil penalties, lower-tier tribunals and county courts. It’s a mess.

The result is that no-one feels on secure ground when defending their legal rights. It’s a bonanza for housing lawyers, ambulance chasing solicitors and pop-up legal ‘experts’ promising fortunes to new entrants to the rental property market if they pay for expensive advice.

On the other hand, extensive evidence bases, the science of risk-assessment and AI-assisted algorithms were not significant factors in drawing up previous watershed acts affecting PRS tenants, in 1957, 1965 and 1988.

This underpinning could help to make the RRA robust and long-lasting, as could the government’s policy objective to bring the totality of rented housing under a common framework of standards, protections and rules, over the next decade. 

Goal of tenure neutrality

Given the history of housing legislation, it is perhaps surprising that the RRA is as coherent as it is. Luke Spanton, head of cross-tenure standards at MHCLG, who spoke at RHE Housing 2026, was a local authority EHO earlier in his professional life. Unusually for a senior civil servant, he understands the ‘sharp end’ – the blend of legal knowledge, nous and pragmatism that make for effective enforcement. This has been reflected in the detail of the legislation and the way that it has been created with the close involvement of practitioners, including RHE Global being commissioned to carry out a major review of the Housing Health and Safety Rating System.

The ambition of the 2026 housing reforms is far-sighted. Underlying the RRA, the Decade of Renewal for social housing, reissued in January, Awaab’s Law, the HHSRS and the new Decency Standard is a desire to move towards a tenure-neutral rented sector, more akin to a European housing system than the UK’s, which, in recent decades, has prioritised the financial well-being of owner occupiers over affordable and secure housing for all. The year 2035, when the Decency Standard will be enforceable in the PRS as well the social rented sector is not an end point, but a way marker towards that ideal.

A mature rented sector would ensure properties covering a spectrum of rent levels. The greatest protection would be in the parts of the sector catering for those with the least choice and the least social and financial capital. That would be the opposite of what we have now – a system in which London councils are spending £5.5 million per day on temporary accommodation and around 1.3 million people are on social housing waiting lists. 

Will we get there? Speakers at RHE Housing 2026, commenting at the event’s closing roundtable, were loath to make prophecies. They agreed that we won’t know for a decade or so – hopefully by the time of RHE Housing 2036.

Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986 specialising in local government. He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own.