To secure our long-term future, and to ensure that our vital community work to continue to thrive and expand in the years ahead, we are creating an exciting new Community and Creative Campus, an ongoing £6.4 million redevelopment project that will create new indoor and outdoor spaces for our local community.
In 2024 we were delighted to announce that planning permission had been granted for the project, allowing us to transform underused ‘back of house’ into new facilities that will benefit the local community and establish a vibrant creative community within our grounds.
What is the Community & Creative Campus?
Studios
The first stage of this project, completed in May 2025, saw us create twenty new artist and maker studios in refurbished historic sheds and stables, set around the tranquil beauty of our Kitchen Garden.
Developed in partnership with the charity Artist Studio Company, the studios will provide affordable creative workspace for up to 50 London-based artists and makers, with the first artists due to take up up residence later this summer.
We’re incredibly excited to have launched our Creative Campus, supporting the next generation of artists in the uniquely beautiful grounds here at Chiswick House and Gardens. We hope to cultivate a vibrant, inclusive creative community that fully reflects the diversity of the local area, with planned open studio days and community events ensuring that this historically significant space will remain welcoming to all for generations to come.
Xanthe Arvanitakis, Director of Chiswick House & Gardens Trust
Read more about our Studios here.
The Learning Hub
We regularly host school groups, with visiting children and educators getting the chance to explore nature in our working Kitchen Garden and wider grounds, finding out more about biodiversity and how ecosystems work, and gaining an understanding for how the food they eat is grown and harvested.
However, our current resources are severely limited.
The creation of our planned new Learning Hub and indoor Clore Learning Space will allow us to host over 7000 horticultural and creative learning activities annually, doubling the number of community partners we are able to welcome, and allowing five times as many school children to benefit from the precious encounters with nature and learning opportunities we offer.
Thanks to a generous £400,000 grant from the London Borough of Hounslow, distributed as part of its Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) funding, we have now raised over £2.5 million – an exciting 75% of the total needed – for the creation of the Learning Hub, with work due to begin towards the end of 2025.
Kitchen Garden Hub
A planned new Kitchen Garden Hub will provide a covered area for volunteers and gardeners, with accessible toilets, a shower and a kitchen, ensuring that more people than ever before will be able to volunteer with us and enjoy the physical and mental health benefits of working with our team, in our beautiful gardens.
Community Fruit Garden
Reaffirming our commitment to sustainable food production in partnership with our local community, the final stage of our redevelopment project will see us rescue an overgrown 17th-century walled garden, transforming it into an orchard where people can come together to garden, grow and harvest fruit and relax together.
Sustainability
Our commitment to sustainability, and to protecting our environment, has been central to the way we have approached this project. Solar panels will ensure that the entire project remains carbon neutral; an existing rainwater harvesting system will be upgraded to reuse rainwater for the Learning Hub toilets; and an Air Source Heat Pump will heat the Learning Hub, Kitchen Garden Hub and Studios.
Our funders
The creation of the Community and Creative Campus has been made possible by generous support from funders including the Mayor of London’s Creative Enterprise Zone, London Borough of Hounslow, The Linbury Trust, Wolfson Foundation, Garfield Weston Foundation, Kusuma Trust, Clore Duffield Foundation, Foyle Foundation, the Swire Charitable Trust, Bernard Sunley Foundation, the Architectural Heritage Fund and many generous individuals.
Interested in supporting the project? Find out more here.