Green Bankside: Health, wellbeing, and greening

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, a moment to pause, check in with yourself, and think about what genuinely helps. Talking to someone, moving your body, stepping away from the screen. But one of the simplest and most overlooked tools for protecting your mental health is right outside your door.

Research consistently shows that time spent in or near green spaces reduces levels of cortisol, the hormone most closely associated with stress. Even brief exposure to natural environments has been linked to lower anxiety, improved mood, and sharper concentration. Studies have found that a 90-minute walk in a natural setting reduced activity in the part of the brain associated with rumination, the repetitive, negative thought patterns that lie at the heart of many mental health struggles.

For those of us working in a dense urban environment, the cumulative effect of concrete, screens, and noise is easy to underestimate. We adapt, we get used to it, but our nervous systems quietly feel the weight. Green space doesn’t just offer a break from that it actively repairs it. The good news is that in Bankside, it’s closer than you think.

A neighbourhood worth exploring

As Better Bankside’s urban gardener, Dan spends his days among the morning commute, watching workers flood into offices, heads deep in thoughts, but he’s also watching something else: whether the newly emerging purple alliums stretching into the sky on Union Street catch anyone’s eye. Or whether anyone pauses at the slow unfurling of shade loving ferns on Keppel Row.

More than plants, it’s about people too

We all know the benefits of being close to nature: birdsong reducing anxiety, tree canopy providing shade, green spaces offering breathing room in a crowded city, but Dan, who was recently invited to speak at Kew Gardens for the annual London Gardners Network, thinks the impact goes deeper than that. A big part of his day as Bankside’s Urban Gardener isn’t just pruning or planting it’s talking. Simple meaningful conversations mostly about plants or bees, while the city runs all around. “It brings joy to stop and talk,” he says and the science backs him up. Human connection is integral to both our physical and mental health, helping to combat loneliness, depression, and social anxiety.

It’s hard to quantify a good morning exchange over a flower bed, or a chat about how dry the soil is, but as Dan puts it; “I know my mental health feels brighter when outside surrounded by bees, rustling leaves, and a conversation about the weather.”

The simplest thing you can do this month

May doesn’t require a grand gesture. It doesn’t require a retreat, a new routine, or a significant lifestyle change though all those things have their place. Sometimes it just requires a different route to the coffee shop. A bench in a churchyard instead of a chair at a desk. Ten minutes under a plane tree that’s been growing since before most of the buildings around it existed.

So, this May take a different route. You might be surprised by what you find.