Skips and Stories

If you've spent any time in London, coming across an unexpected garden or green space is not entirely uncommon. There are lots of them. But this one's different. It's ramshackle and homespun, clearly a labour of love. Most unusually, the trees, fruit bushes, vegetables and flowers are all planted in skips, or dumpsters as our American friends might call them. I have stumbled into the Skip Garden.

There are rows of skips, painted in red and white, green and blue. Rather than fill them with soil and treat them as giant metal plant pots, they have been designed as little modular gardens. They have planters within them, the surface of the soil level with the top of the skip, so everything is blooming at chest height. Volunteers climb up short wooden ladders leaning against each one, and step down into it to tend the plants. Some of the skips have arches of bamboo or makeshift poly-tunnels. Among the plants people have added handwritten signs and shelves to share seedlings or books. There are strange sculptures of wire, painted stones – human creativity in the service of joy. All around the skips are planters made of scrap wood, things growing in tubs and out of old wheelbarrows. Nothing is planted directly in the ground, because this is a garden that is designed to be moved.

When I first moved to London, King's Cross was a scruffy part of town. Beyond its well-connected railway station, it didn't seem to have much to offer. Derelict railyards and obsolete canals, dubious budget hotels with peeling paintwork – a place to come and go from rather than a place to live. Look a little closer and there was more to it. The lower land values made it a place where niche businesses and unprofitable subcultures could hold on a little longer against the tide of gentrification. For newcomers it was a place to get a toehold in an expensive city, giving it a multicultural vibrancy and excellent Ethiopian restaurants. It had more culture and community than passing commuters may have realised.

What it didn't have was time. King's Cross was earmarked for regeneration. Moving outwards from the refurbished St Pancras hotel and the new Eurostar terminal came streets of offices and luxury apartments, corporate headquarters, the flagship buildings of research institutes nudged up alongside the British Library. For a decade the bulldozers came and went, levelling the next tranche of disused freight terminals or substandard housing. And in the space between demolition and construction came the Skip Garden.

Led by the charity Global Generation, the Skip Garden was tended by local young people, volunteers and King's Cross residents. They brought their own ideas to it, a place to connect with the land and with each other, a place to create and to belong. Central to that vision was the Skip Garden Kitchen, which served food grown in the garden at long tables where everyone ate together.

It was also a place to learn new skills and experiment. Local architectural students got their first commissions designing pavilions and shelters, cabins and sheds. These were made from reclaimed materials from nearby demolitions, with a striking two-storey greenhouse made from salvaged windows. With the rainwater catchment providing water for the gardens, and on-site composting for waste, the Skip Garden was a living demonstration of sustainable practice.

Fifteen years on from that evening of discovery, I am in King's Cross again. My own life has changed. I'm a husband and a father. Because my writer's income wouldn't stretch to a shoebox in the city these days, I no longer live in London.

King's Cross has also changed. An elegant water feature in black stone trickles through a deep courtyard between offices and people drink white wine in the shade. Streets of anonymous blocks, strangely quiet buildings advertising co-working spaces or trendy new forms of city living that not enough people seem to want. Shops and boutiques with abstract names selling expensive lamps.

We find ourselves in the Samsung Store. There's nobody else there, no queue for the activities that are meant to showcase the corporation's technology: a machine that paints a wooden egg to visitor's specifications. Another that takes a picture of the children and prints out a collage artwork of their faces. It's made to look like torn paper, but it's all printed – a simulated computer version of that human instinct to cobble things together out of whatever is to hand. The machines are clever and fun, but this is creativity in the service of profit and it feels perfunctory and soulless.

King's Cross is glossy and sleek these days. There are some fine new public spaces and architecture to enjoy. Thomas Heatherwick's sweeping re-invention of Coal Drops Yard, the striking ironwork of Gasholder Park, the teasing fountains of Granary Square. But something has been lost along the way.

There are none of the rough edges, the neglected patches, the creative mess that makes a place feel lived in. How could you make your mark in a place like this? When a place is so carefully designed and curated, what room is there for your ideas and your participation?

Perhaps that's why, after a decade of moving from site to site around the redevelopments, the Skip Garden is getting its first permanent home. King's Cross needs its pocket of loving green anarchy more than ever, and Global Generation has secured a triangular site on what used to be a car park. It's a little smarter than it used to be, but the skips are still there, painted white and lined up down one side. It's now called the Story Garden, a name chosen by the community of volunteers and reflecting both the genesis of the garden and the personal stories of the thousands of people who have tended it over the years. If you're ever in London, you're likely to pass through King's Cross. All the rail lines lead there. Step out of the station. Take a walk, and you'll find the beating heart of the district – in a skip.