Three years of hard work by a team of community volunteers and local organisations have turned the dream of bringing a city farm in South Bristol back to life into a reality.
The final part of the work to create a vibrant new city farm in Hartcliffe will be launched next month, with the grand opening of a ‘Playful Barn’, providing an indoor venue that will be free and available all year round for local families.
The launch will take place at a big Harvest Festival event at Hartcliffe City Farm, which is happening on Saturday, October 19, with the party between 10.30am and 2.30am, and the farm itself open as usual until 4pm.
It’s been a long road for Hartcliffe City Farm, which was set up by the South Bristol community back in the 1970s, after the controversy and collapse of the previous organisation that ran it, in 2019 and the months leading up to the Covid pandemic in early 2020.
Bristol City Council took back control of the farm, and it remained closed for two years as a number of takeovers and rescue plans were proposed, before the council handed it to a partnership between local community group Heart of BS13, and the expertise of Windmill Hill City Farm in Bedminster.
They took on the farm in 2021, and it finally reopened with a Jubilee Party in 2022, albeit with ambitious plans to expand, enhance, build and refurbish the site completely.
“It’s been three years of really hard graft to sort the place out, get it back up and running and then start building and improving, and the Playful Barn is the big part of that, the final piece,” said Ellie Vowles, who is part of the team. “The team have done lots of groundwork and we’re now in a position where the farm is its own organisation, still obviously with our parents being Windmill Hill and Heart of BS13.
“This is a very different site now, and we’ve such amazing community support from everyone in Hartcliffe, who have continued to back us, even though this has been a building site for a quite a while,” she added.
The farm’s pigs, goats, sheep and lambs, chickens, geese, ducks and guinea pigs are firm favourites with local children and parents, and the Heart of BS13 run a separate Flower Farm on part of the site, that fills the area with colour. The farm itself is very visible, but not routinely open to the public – apart from on event days like the Harvest Festival.
“What’s been missing is a play space that’s free for the children and is there for when it rains, indoors, that can be the heart of the farm, and the barn conversion, securing the roof and all the rest of the work has been great,” added Ellie.
“The Playful Barn has everything. We’ve got a cafe area with picnic tables, a big mud kitchen for children to play in, a wobbly bridge, climbing stuff, a tree house, and a reading corner, and there’s play equipment for the toddlers, too. We’re really looking forward to finishing it all and opening it up so it can be something free for all the local families right through the winter,” said Ellie.
The Harvest Festival event is £1 to enter, with the option to donate to the farm with a £3 ticket if you can afford it, while under-11s are free. Tickets are available on the door and on the Eventbrite site, and the farm says tickets for children have to be booked to give them an idea of how many people are coming.