Wolves Lane goes solar!

In July this year the Wolves Lane Centre community celebrated the installation of solar panels.

On 20th July this summer, site users and volunteers at Wolves Lane held a celebration of their newly installed solar panels. This was the culmination of a huge effort to raise the funds and install the panels to make the Wolves Lane site more sustainable. Local food growing and energy generation will play an important part in our move to a low carbon future.

The panels will generate electricity for use on site. It is a 12.4 kiloWatt hour peak system and since installation has generated 5.27 megaWatt hours and saved just over 2,000 kilogrammes of carbon emissions (equivalent to planting 7 trees). Most of the electricity will be used in the Palm House, where water pumps use a lot of energy. The installation work was carried out for free by a local resident who runs solar installation company Drakes Renewables. There are 31 panels on two roofs and it is an innovative installation using 400 W panels imported from Canada.

The money for the panels was raised through a crowdfund run by Spacehive for the Mayor of London’s office. The panels were paid for by local residents (including members of the Friends of Wolves Lane) and local rap artist Jhus. Generous donations from the Mayor of London and Haringey Council will add to the project by paying for insulation materials and fees for legal and electrical work.

Wolves Lane Plant Centre https://wolveslane.org/, was formerly the plant nursery for Haringey Council. The site is still owned by Haringey Council and is leased to the Wolves Lane Consortium (Organiclea, Crop Drop and the Ubele Initiative) and is growing a huge harvest of local food that supports a local veg bag scheme (Crop Drop, https://www.cropdrop.co.uk/), a London restaurant (Ottolenghi), food for homeless people (Edible London, https://ediblelondon.weebly.com/ ) and Black Rootz . Local not-for-profit Wolves Lane Flower Company also rent space onsite (https://www.wolveslaneflowercompany.com/ ).

For more details please contact Pamela Harling pjharling@hotmail.com.

Wolves Lane classroom roof

Wolves Lane boiler house roof

Wolves Lane Consortium

The Wolves Lane Consortium was officially formed last month.

Ubele along with Crop Drop and Organiclea are now legal partners and ‘stewards’ of the 3 acre site.

This will enable Ubele to build its’ Community Engagement and Development, Leadership Development and Social Business offer at Wolves Lane.

It also means that Ubele is now located on a site which it can support and help create as an example of ‘good practice’.

Solar Panels installed!

We’re excited to report on the result of our Crowdfund last year.

Drakes Renewables, a local business, have installed two arrays for us.  On the boiler house roof (18 panels) shown above and another 13 on the classroom roof. It is a 12.4kW peak system with very high specification panels (possibly a UK first).

It was all connected up late on Thursday 23rd May and generated 272 kW hours – equivalent to saving 107 kg of CO2 and planting nearly half a tree in the first week.

We have a web portal which gives us real time information about what the panels are up to. We plan to have a display which will show in real time how much power we are generating and and our CO2 savings. 

So, we would like to thank all the people who supported our crowdfund!

This will really help the site finances because we will save on our electricity bills and we will receive the Feed in Tariff.  We will use most of the electricity on site, but may consider installing a battery to store electricity we don’t use immediately.

The project also helps the Borough towards its  target to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2050.

The project has been a fantastic team effort from the site volunteers, the Ubele Initiative, Crop Drop and Organiclea and we are all very proud of this achievement

Spring 2019 Community Market


Sunday 19th May, 12-5pm

We’re delighted to announce our Spring Community Market  at Wolves Lane Centre.

Join us for an afternoon of celebration with food, music, family activities and market stalls organised by a collection of community organisations!

What to expect? – food – music – plants, seeds and veggies for sale – palm house tours – raffle – family activities – market stalls with crafts, vintage clothes and many more!

If you are interested in having a stall or volunteering at this event, please contact rachel.seghir-barnes@ubele.org

Garden Day 2019

Sunday 12th May 2019, 10.00 – 16.00

Down tools and join us at Wolves Lane as we celebrate Garden Day with a host of green fingered and family friendly activities throughout the day including:

  • Growing and arts and crafts activities for babies and children,
  • Site tours led by growers,
  • Pay what you can community lunch,
  • Scrub Up Wolves Lane – a community gardening session,
  • Dr Bike cycle maintenance workshop
  • Plants and produce on sale
  • and lots more!

Entry is free.

On street parking is available nearby but no parking is possible on site. 

Check back here or on our facebook and instagram for more updates.


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