Vauxhall Garden Project

This event marked the start of a long-term project for KCL Smile Society. We attended the first local advisory event for the Vauxhall Gardens Estate Well London project. For those of you who do not know where Vauxhall Gardens Estate is, it is on the south side of the river Thames in between Waterloo station and Vauxhall station and consists of over 2000 residents. Well London is a community development approach to promoting healthier lifestyles.

The advisory event was held at the Carmelita Centre (one of two community centres within the estate area) where topics such as mental wellbeing, bringing the community together, healthy eating, healthy spaces, physical activity and using the arts in an attempt to redevelop the Estate were discussed. The discussion took place amongst a variety of groups, including representatives from KCL Smile Society (Aaron Gurmail and Rijjula Karanjkar), and more importantly, with members of the Vauxhall Gardens Estate community. Lengthy discussions went on to identify the needs of the community, current barriers to communication, how we would obtain the necessary information from the community, how we could use resources currently running in the community and what resources could be offered for this project.KCL Smile Society will be fully supporting this project with the help of our many, many volunteers. Ideas from KCL Smile Society included offeringdental health screening, discussing dental health as well as basic general health with the community and the importance of a healthy diet.

It was concluded that block managers in the estate would be a good point of call for distributing information as well as nominating leaders for each block. Furthermore it was established that the Carmelita Centre and Vauxhall Gardens Community Centre were the heart of the community, and as such, useful resources from which to direct efforts in this Well London Project.