Hackney City Farm

There's a working farm in Haggerston with donkeys, pigs, sheep, and bees — and it's completely free.

Hackney City Farm sits on a site that's been feeding London for over two hundred years. In the early eighteen hundreds, farmers and market gardeners grew produce here for the city. Then West's Brewery moved in during the late eighteen eighties and brewed beer until the nineteen thirties, supplying pubs along Hackney Road and Bethnal Green. The well they used for brewing water is still there, capped in the front garden. After the brewery closed, the site passed through furniture makers and button manufacturers before the Jeakins family turned it into a road haulage depot from nineteen forty onwards.

By the early nineteen eighties, it was a derelict lorry park. A group of locals — inspired by the success of Kentish Town City Farm — started keeping a few animals in the nearby Covent Gardens in nineteen eighty-two. Two years later, Hackney Council gave them a hundred-year lease on this site, and they transformed it from a dirty truck yard into a proper working farm.

Today there are poultry, sheep, rabbits, pigs, bees, and a donkey. The on-site restaurant Frizzante won Time Out's best family restaurant award in two thousand and four. In twenty fifteen, the farm registered with Ofsted as an alternative school for up to ten pupils aged thirteen to seventeen — teenagers who'd fallen out of mainstream education, learning through animal husbandry and horticulture instead of textbooks.

It's a registered charity, entirely free to visit, and most Londoners have no idea it exists.