The world's first community-powered sauna, heated by food waste from residents of a neighbouring housing estate, is set to open in Poplar, east London. The sauna is part of R-Urban Poplar, a civic space and 'living lab' where locals experiment with taking charge of their food supply and adapting to the climate crisis.
Circular design turns scraps into heat
Scraps from kitchens on the Teviot estate will be processed in a local-scale anaerobic digester—another UK first—to produce methane gas to power the sauna. 'As far as we are aware this is the UK's – and the world's – first community powered sauna,' says Andy Belfield, an architect from the R-Urban Poplar team.
The site, once an unused car park and empty garages, now features raised no-dig beds, micro-allotments, and communal growing spaces where locals cultivate herbs, courgettes, potatoes, and passion flowers. Butterflies flutter among the plants, a stark contrast to the traffic thundering down the nearby A12.
An ecology hub for circular urban farming
R-Urban Poplar is more ambitious than a community garden. It is an 'ecology hub' prototyping circular urban farming, mushroom growing, and restore-and-repair services. Wild spaces encourage pollinators, and there is a community kitchen, classroom, workshop, tool library, and even a mushroom farm.
Its designers see it as a tentative vision of a society that can thrive despite climate breakdown. 'That's why this site is particularly interesting,' says Elle McAll from the Women's Environmental Network (Wen), which has helped fund R-Urban for five years. 'It's combining the technology and the technical side with the community building, the community side. Addressing the climate crisis isn't about just those technical solutions in isolation.'
Part of a wider food system reimagining
R-Urban Poplar is one of 26 sites in a Wen-led project to embed an environmentally sustainable, socially just, and community-led food system across Tower Hamlets, one of London's most deprived boroughs. Outdoor space is a rare luxury: about four in five households live in flats, and four in 10 families live in poverty. The borough has the UK's highest population density and high levels of air pollution.
'The whole thing really has been about how can we reimagine our local food system so it really does genuinely benefit local communities,' says McAll.
Community connections through food
At a second Wen-supported site on the Limborough estate, Toyoba Chowdhuri tends her micro-allotment, growing aubergines, courgettes, black chillies, malabar spinach, and snake gourds. 'I'm living in Commercial Road. I haven't got any [outside space] there,' she says. City life severed her connection to the land she had growing up in rural Bangladesh; her plot restores it. She takes two buses to reach the site, coming morning and evening every day.
'Food is something that everybody needs but also has deep emotional connection to memories,' says McAll. 'It represents so much. It's such a simple, unifying thing that can be a starting point for a lot of conversations.'
Sauna as economic driver
For R-Urban Poplar, the sauna will be pivotal. 'What we can see from the modelling is that for food growing you have to do it at a certain scale to make it really economical,' says Rokiah Yaman of Mad Leap, who is masterminding the site's anaerobic digester. 'But actually something like the community sauna is a brilliant way of really making the most value out of what we're doing. If you heat a sauna and then you charge for those sauna spaces and you have multiple sessions a day with 10 people in the session, that makes a big difference.'
