An abandoned lot that was turned into a community garden will have to make way for new housing after Greenwich Council rejected local’s petition to save the site.

The Royal Hill Community Garden was built on the council-owned derelict site of an old police station after locals cleaned up the mountains of rubbish there.

Today thousands of locals visit the garden, as well as visitors from out-of-town, and people call it an “oasis of calm” in the borough.

However Greenwich Council still own the site and have said they need it for more housing, previously asking the community there to vacate the site.

A petition with 891 signatures was submitted to the council asking for the land to be continued to be used as a community garden.

At a council meeting on July 19, Council Leader Denise Hyland said the site has to be used for housing.

She said: “London has a desperate shortage of housing. We simply cannot leave a piece of land that could house two families, it’s simply not tenable.”

Tony Othen is part of the group trying to save the garden. He said: “A community has been created where none existed before.

“It’s been thousands of people who are interested not just local people who are interested in having the garden.

“It wasn’t created by anyone out of a Nimby thing, we just cleared up all of the rubbish from an abandoned site.”

The community garden campaigners have had support from numerous local politicians, including Greenwich and Woolwich MP Matthew Pennycook.

Two previous planning applications on the site have been rejected, in both 2014 and 2016, and now an architectural competition is being held for what should be built at the site.

In its official response to the petition, Greenwich Council said: “London is desperately short of housing and the Royal Borough of Greenwich, like all local authorities, is committed to creating new homes where we can and we have a duty to look at the land that we own, both large and small, to see how we can best utilise these spaces to create more housing.”