About us

Welcome to the Children of One End Street like all things it has a story. I have a love of children, children’s books, creativity, community and countryside. I have a Bachelor in Education in mathematics and science and during my studies I came across chaos theory and group theory. Following a period of teaching, I decided to study garden design and developed a number of gardens in inner city schools. I had not come across a kindergarten until a trip to Denmark to visit a plant nursery on the same site as a kindergarten where the emphasis was on outdoors and growing and preparing food with the children, something I had done as a child with my family. The kindergarten is a mixed age range and like tending young seedlings to flower or fruit we nurture the child.

The chaos of being a three year old being led by a will to do, to the order of a six year old who might want to fall off the chair but chooses to be straight and true. In their last year of kindergarten the older children are an example for the younger child. The children move from an awareness of what they need to having an awareness of what others need.

If you had time to hear the whole story, it would start with buying a print of the alphabet, by a friend and local artist, which needed a wall to be hung on and still is there. As is often the case, at that time I imagined this would be in a shop selling natural toys, clothing and craft for children with a pup sitting under the shop counter. The first chapter, The puppy Leonard comes home, and the search for a shop brought me to the very place where The Children of One End Street has been since 2008, 1 Gloucester Street, Stroud. We are in the middle of town, next to a wholefood cafe, Star Anise, but we were never a shop but a kindergarten, where we play shop and make a counter and where you can buy the very things we love to use in the kindergarten. The final chapter, Further Adventures of One End Street, would be to republish a children’s book, now out of print.