Saffron Central was a Space Hive funded
pop-up saffron farm. It was built on the site
of the former council building Taberner House,
in the autumn of 2015.
The saffron farm was an idea generated
by Ally McKinlay an employee of
Croydon Council following a feature on his
Croydon radio show “Made in Croydon”.
The feature was called Crocus watch
Ally asked listeners to send photos of
crocuses popping up around Croydon.
This proved popular and resulted in the
Space Hive project to fund a crocus farm.
The crocuses were planted on
19 September, by a group of almost
200 volunteers.
They potted 19,500 corms.

I started a radio show for Croydon radio
just over 3 years ago and its called
Made in Croydon.
It’s mainly about getting people
who are doing positive things in Croydon,
on as guests and they have to select tunes
and things and talk about whatever
it is they are doing.
When I didn’t have guests I was sort of
exploring Croydon’s history and stumbled
on the name possibly coming from the
Anglo Saxon’s ‘croh denu’ meaning
crocus valley. So I started a feature
on the radio called ‘crocus watch’
which was getting people to tell me about
crocuses popping up around Croydon
and sending me pictures.

Originally these were spring time crocuses.
I dug deeper into the history, and found out
that the Romans had farmed saffron here.
I was at the Ambition festival last summer
and I was in Queens Gardens and i heard
that the Taberner house site was
going to be vacant until the new year
and knew if you planted them in
August/ September they should be in flower
within about 40 days.

So i floated the idea to
a couple of people who were enthusiastic
about it and spoke to councillors
who put me in touch with the people
who are in charge of the Taberner house site,
they liked the idea and allowed us into the site.
In total we picked 11, 000 flowers
so in theory we have 33,000 stigmas,
collectively the weight is 58 grams.
And as a rule of thumb
Saffron is worth about £10 a gram.

In the Anglo-Saxon period
crocus sativas
which grew in Croydon.
This gained Croydon its name
'Croh Denu' or 'Croindene'
meaning saffron valley.

This species of crocus differs
from all the others as
it has three long red strands
which are the saffron.
All three strands together
are called 'Pushall saffron'.
The saffron is picked out
with tweezers, making harvesting
labour-intensive work,
which explains the high value
of the crop.

The pop up farm in Croydon
was a community led project
and was run by volunteers.
The plan was for the
cultivated crop to be distributed
to parks and community
groups throughout the Borough
to encourage the spread
of Crocus sativas in Croydon.

To find out more about the origins
of Croydon’s name
visit the Research room.

The Research room is open
Tuesday - Saturday 10.30 - 17.00
and can be found on the lower ground
floor of the Croydon Clocktower.