Poppleton Community Railway Nursery

The Nursery is open 10 am to 3 pm Monday, Wednesday and Friday subject to social distancing.

Poppleton Community Railway Nursery is Britain's last surviving Railway Nursery situated in Poppleton near York. It is operated by a charitable group as a non-profit organisation.

Poppleton Community Railway Nursery has a partnership with health agencies in the York area, which has long found horticultural skills training to be therapeutic for adults recovering from mental health crises. For these volunteers the benefits of working at the nursery include improvements in confidence and self-esteem, social development through working alongside a range of different people and the opportunity to make new friends and build new relationships. It also helps them to learn about aspects of growing plants, simple DIY skills and could help to enhance their future career prospects.

Paul Botting NHS Technical Instructor, said:

The NHS trust needed to find opportunities to work in the community instead of an in-house nursery, so our nursery contents were donated to Poppleton and we now have an expanded range of activities to offer the main one that we can work in partnership with the nursery volunteers."

Other partnerships and community projects will be added from time to time as the complex again becomes fully operational and volunteers and funding permit. 

Help the Nursery

The Management Committee have now agreed plans to renovate our original wooden greenhouse (G7, 8 and 9) to make it into a multi-purpose community space. This will be very expensive to restore/rebuild and is becoming urgent to prevent further deterioration. As a first step, it will be cleared of unwanted items and any good quality wood will be reused. The asbestos will be removed by a specialist contractor and a new roof will be put on G7.

Investigations continue into the provision of new, larger, modern toilets. Quotes for a suitable replacement building are being obtained.

As with G7-9, this will be a big project which will involve a substantial outlay. We are most grateful to those who have already made substantial donations towards the cost of both projects and to our grant funders.

Our volunteers are continuing to work on building replacement doors for some of our sheds, which are now beginning to show their age. A separate project involves building new compost bins at the back of S10, so that the current compost area can be resited here.
If you can help with any of these important projects, please offer whatever you can afford - even the smallest donations are most welcome.

You can send a cheque to the nursery or call in and see one of the officers.

Many thanks in advance for your help.