Chinbrook Community Orchard

Planted in 1991 by Lewisham’s Nature Conservation Team, the orchard is designated as a Grade II Site of Borough Importance for Nature Conservation. Most of the trees are traditional (mostly Kentish) varieties of fruit trees, including cobnuts, plums, pears, cherries, walnuts, and no fewer than 30 varieties of apples. Their names are wonderfully poetic – ‘Kentish Filbasket’, ‘Beauty of Kent’, ‘Decio’, ‘Allington Pippin’. A few more exotic species, including a cork oak, olives, walnuts, and stone pines, were also planted to reflect the borough’s ethnic diversity as well as a small demonstration vineyard.

The grass between the fruit trees is managed as a hay meadow and cut rotationally every year to provide a habitat for wood mice, common lizards, slow worms, and a variety of invertebrates including stag beetles who all benefit from the various dead wood structures created in the orchard. Ant hills are also present in the grassland. The grass vetchling, an uncommon species in Lewisham, grows in profusion. Currently, two allotment plot holders keep beehives in the orchard.

Two ponds on the edge of the orchard are planted with a mix of native marginal and aquatic plants. Common frogs, common toads, and smooth newts all breed in the ponds feeding in the surrounding tall grassland.

The orchard is managed on a day-to-day basis for the London Borough of Lewisham by a dedicated group of allotment plot holders with an Orchard Sub-committee reporting to the Allotment Committee.