Innovative design and high environmental standards have made the Grassroots community centre a neighbourhood landmark that local people are proud to use. Designed by Eger Architects.
The building accommodates a healthy eating café, a multi purpose hall available for hire, a crèche for 20 children and a nursery for 40, as well as a GP and health centre. It also holds a nurse led 'personal medical service' (a health centre with nurses acting as the employers of other team members, including locum GPs), and the Children's Community Nursing Team (a nursing service, including outreach services, for families who have children with a wide variety of health problems). The Anti-Social Behaviour Team (officers from the London Borough of Newham Anti-Social Behaviour Unit) will be based on site.
Grassroots in Memorial Park is Newham’s second community resource centre. Like the first, The Hub, which opened in March 2005, the building is part of a wider strategic programme to provide access to improve the quality of life in a historically deprived area of East London. Both centres were developed on the basis that a well designed, sustainable, energy efficient building would contribute positively both to the people who use them as well as the wider neighbourhood.
The local Community Food Enterprise manages the café, and runs a popular mobile food store, selling fresh fruit and vegetables to a community historically badly supplied with sources of fresh food; as Grassroots opened, the neighbourhood's first local supermarket, Somerfield, had been open for a matter of months. This work is complemented by a healthy eating programme run by the Health Improvement Team (HIT), an outreach team that deals with a range of health issues across all ages, and encourages healthy lifestyles.
Both The Hub and Grassroots have been developed as part of the Government's New Deal for Communities (NDC) initiative, a key programme in its strategy to tackle multiple deprivation in the most deprived neighbourhoods in the country. Central tenets of this programme are partnership working and community involvement. The agencies involved in Grassroots and Memorial Park are many and varied; during the planning phase for Grassroots, discussions were held with the ten neighbouring local authorities, the local Sure Start, Primary Care Trust and police as well as the Community Housing Association. A programme of public consultation and community involvement resulted in genuine community involvement in the development of the buildings, and helped to embed Grassroots and The Hub locally. Of the two buildings, the Hub was planned, designed and constructed first. By the time plans for Grassroots were being developed, the local residents involved in the consultation were demanding a high quality landmark development.
