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WELCOME!

Thank you for visiting our website.  Here you will find information about our unique Ashford Baby Memorial Garden, baby memorials elsewhere in East Kent, our history, links to other support available, and information about our awareness and fundraising activities.

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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. 

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.

In October 2024 we got the go ahead for a new baby memorial area in Sittingbourne (St George V Park). We are now able to take orders for nametiles in this new area, and will share more information very soon.

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.

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WHAT WE DO

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Our wonderful Ashford Baby Memorial Garden was created in 2013 to give families a place to remember their special babies in a positive way. It is bright and welcoming, and we encourage anyone to visit. 

To find out more about the Garden, and for information on Name Tiles, please click here.

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A really important part of our work is raising awareness of baby loss and giving people a safe space to talk about their losses. 

Click here for details of our awareness and fundraising activities.

 

If you would like to know more about volunteering with us you can find out more on the Our Volunteers page. 

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We offer support to local families through a range of events through the year, including Baby Loss Awareness Week and our Annual Teddy Bears Picnic. Find out more about these events and more.

There are also many other charities offering support to anyone affected by the death of a baby. Click here for a list of organisations that can help.

CONTACT US

Get in touch with East Kent Baby Memorial Garden volunteers to learn more about our work and how you can get involved.

Phone: 07511 021636

Correspondence Address: c/o 36 Loudon Court, Ashford, Kent, TN23 3NE

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