This month we open our doors for the very first time! Come and join in the fun as we officially launch Northern Roots.
The BIG Welcome
The countdown is on to our opening celebration! It’s been a long time in the making and everyone is invited to The BIG Welcome on Saturday 19 September! A free and family friendly afternoon of fun, food, play, plants, music and more set within our beautiful new green space here in the heart of Oldham.
Our site will come alive with a collection of roaming performers. Bump into a bubble artist or shake hands with a stilt walker or unicyclist. We’ll have colourful face painting, hula hooping and giant jenga.
We’ll have live music sets from a collection of talented musicians and you’ll be able explore our brand new play area.
It will be a great opportunity to chat to our team of growers on our new four acre working urban farm and make wildflower seed bombs with our volunteers. Our onsite businesses will be giving tasters of their work too – from bracelet making with Common Cloth to bee spotting with Hive5 Manchester. And you can try some meditation with our Natural Health Service team.
And alongside all this free activity, we’ll have lots of tasty food for sale from our new café. Expect mezze plates and seasonal salad to cakes and pastries, using fresh ingredients straight from our farm. The kids can try our new children’s menu and tuck into Oldham made Grandpa Greene’s ice-cream too.
Guided Walks
Early this month on Thursday 10 September we’ve got a sold out guided walk led by our Heritage Champions. If you’re lucky enough to have a ticket you’ll get to explore the many layers of rich heritage of our site through maps, images, forgotten stories and poetry.
You can discover the stories of Brook Mills, a mill that once sat on our Brook Mills Gardens, visit the site of Victorian visitor destination Strawberry Gardens, the forgotten homestead and residents of Cherry Valley, and retrace the tracks of the Oldham to Ashton railway, now locally known as Tip Road.
As you explore the site, our Heritage Champions will bring the fascinating history of the site back to life, celebrating the people, places, and events that have shaped this area over generations.
And at the end of the month on Saturday 26 September we’re teaming up with Portraits of Recovery for a site-responsive audio-based walking trail through our 160-acre green space here in Oldham. Led by artist Phillip Davenport we invite you to move through the landscape – listening, pausing and encountering Northern Roots through stories of resilience, memory and connection.
Food steps not food miles
Across Snipe Clough Farm, our four acres urban farm, we’re growing a whole host of fruit and vegetables.
And as the hot summer draws to a close our harvest of tomatoes is looking particularly bumper. We’ve grown a wide variety of tomatoes, including Black Strawberry, Honeycomb, Golden Bumblebee, Sweet Casaday, Brad’s Atomic Grape and Green Zebra. Different shapes, sizes, and colours, all super tasty.
Alongside tomatoes you’ll spot beetroot, courgettes and more on our cafe menu fresh from the farm. Food steps not food miles.
So will you be joining us at Northern Roots this month? We hope so!