Kitchen Garden, RHS Garden Bridgewater, Salford

A kitchen garden with an experimental spirit 

Just west of Manchester, the 154-acre Salford site is the Royal Horticultural Society’s fifth public garden, opening to great acclaim in summer 2021.

Designed to evoke the experimental spirit of Victorian walled kitchen gardens, the main pathways of the garden are inspired by the route of the Bridgewater Canal whilst the smaller pathways and layout of the beds follow the pattern of local field boundaries of the same time, found in historic Ordnance Survey maps of the 1890s.

The horticultural intention is for the Kitchen Garden to be an experimental productive space that evolves and develops over time. The garden has four distinct zones: an edible forest garden, a formal kitchen garden, and a herbal garden. The fourth zone weaves around the stunning and historic surrounding walls, and showcases the very best of horticultural creativity and skill in fruit training.

In 2022, RHS Bridgewater won first prize in the European Garden Awards, in the Design or Concept of a Contemporary Park or Garden category and was a runner-up for the prestigious Dame Sylvia Crowe Award at the 2022 Landscape Institute Awards, which recognises landscape excellence around the world.