Poppleton Community Railway Nursery

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 nursery is most grateful to The Rotary Club of York Vikings for their generous donation of £500 towards our nursery van. Also to Howdens Joinery Ltd for the donation of a brand new fitted kitchen and appliances to improve the volunteer experience at the nursery.

We are currently raising funds to complete the extension of our narrow gauge railway. To this end we have already allocated the proceeds from our recent very successful St Crux sales day towards the railway project. 

We are also looking 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 detoriation. 

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.