WELCOME!

The Ashford Baby Memorial Garden was created in 2013 after we raised £30,000.  There are baby areas within many crematoria but the Ashford Garden is unique in being right in the town centre, fully accessible and open all day, every day.  It is a vibrant area designed for anyone to visit, with lovely bright plants, specially hand carved benches, and a beautiful ‘teardrop’ mosaic. 

The Garden is managed by our volunteers (we have no staff) who regularly visit to check on litter and weeds etc, while the main maintenance and replanting itself is done by Ashford Council’s Aspire team on a repayment basis.

Within the Garden we have boards with tiles remembering 400 of our special babies, with their name and a significant date.  These tiles are available for a one-off cost of £40  or we can take instalments if that would help.  Please click here for further details.

The Garden also helps raise awareness of the numbers of babies who die. Every day 14 babies are stillborn after 24 weeks of pregnancy, or die within their first few weeks, that is one every 100 minutes, or over 5,000 a year.  A further 250,000 babies are lost to miscarriage each year - more than one in five pregnancies ends in a loss.  Our garden is there to remember every one of those special babies.

Between 2013 and 2020 we ran the Garden under the umbrella of East Kent Sands charity.  But we wanted more autonomy to run the Garden for all babies (irrespective of their age) and wanted to be able raise money specifically for the Garden and decided to create the new charity.  We still work alongside Sands, the Miscarriage Association and other charities and do our best to signpost people to those organisations for support.

As well as the Ashford Garden, we also want to look at small baby memorial areas elsewhere in East Kent and already have talked to crematoria at Charing, Margate and Hawkinge. We have worked with the West Faversham Community Centre to create a memorial area in their garden for local families to remember their babies and are delighted that this is now open. 

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In 2023 we opened a baby memorial area in Westgate Park in Canterbury which is a lovely location alongside the river. We are also talking to the council in Sittingbourne about options for a memorial area there.  We put pressure on the NHS Trust to improve the baby cemetery at the back of the Canterbury Hospital and are pleased that improvements have been made.

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We are a very small charity and have to fundraise for most of our money, and this limits what we can do.  But if you have any ideas about how we could remember babies in your local area please let us know.