Restoring Birmingham’s Botanical Gardens for Life is a £19m, 4.5-year capital development project to restore the Grade II* historic glasshouse estate, improve visitor and learning facilities, and extend community engagement to create a place of horticultural excellence and an outstanding green space for Birmingham and the Midlands’ region.

The project will ensure the preservation of Birmingham’s priceless heritage and save these beautiful Gardens for future generations. It is a transformational project that will restore the glasshouse estate to its former magnificence, improve key spaces and facilities, including education spaces and the plant nursery, provide a suitable environment to care for the living collections, strengthen financial resilience and increase public understanding of plants, sustainability, and environmental issues.

With significant strategic support, Birmingham Botanical Gardens is the flagship green project in Birmingham City Council’s Future City Plan, and we will champion and work in partnership to protect, restore, and enhance the natural environment. The project supports the city and the West Midlands Combined Authority’s net zero targets, green agenda, and opportunity to strengthen the local economy, skills, education and sense of place. Our local schools, residents, neighbourhood networks and community welfare groups view BBG as uniquely valuable to those at a grass roots level. Our landlords, Calthorpe Estates, are supporting us to promote green spaces and nature to more people, for the long term.

We’re delighted to share that Birmingham Botanical Gardens has been awarded £9.075m from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, to support the project. With The National Lottery Heritage Fund’s grant, together with generous pledges of support (£8m) from The Garfield Weston Foundation, The Julia Rausing Trust, The Edward Cadbury Charitable Trust and others, we can now preserve this historic estate, nursery and iconic glasshouses for future generations.
Click here to read the full press release.

With over 90% of the funding now in place, we are appealing to all those who care about the Gardens to help us finally close the gap! To achieve this, we need everyone who cares about the future of the Gardens to help us to raise these substantial funds: philanthropy, trusts, foundations, corporate sponsors, and individuals. We’ll soon be sharing the many ways you can help to support our Growing Our Green Heritage project.
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The National Lottery Heritage Fund is the largest funder for the UK’s heritage. Using money raised by National Lottery players we support projects that connect people and communities to heritage. Our vision is for heritage to be valued, cared for and sustained for everyone, now and in the future. From historic buildings, our industrial legacy and the natural environment, to collections, traditions, stories and more.
Heritage can be anything from the past that people value and want to pass on to future generations. We believe in the power of heritage to ignite the imagination, offer joy and inspiration, and to build pride in place and connection to the past.