The first time I met Mel Rees, she was explaining how she ended up using an old pasting table to set up a stall on George Street to show people how to recycle better.

Nearly three years later, she is looking a bit bewildered in the middle of The Green Centre on Manor Hill in Whitehawk, the latest incarnation of the project she started all that time ago on the other side of the city.

“I am just astounded,” she says. “It’s brilliant, but it’s hard to take it all in.”

The Green Centre sits on the corner of Manor Hill and Manor Road on the east side of Brighton and, despite only being open a matter of weeks, it is already a busy and popular eco community centre.

Inside the glass-fronted shop are facilities for recycling all the niggly things that struggle to go elsewhere, such as milk bottle tops, socks with holes in the heels and aluminium foil. There is a pile of resource boxes for educators, the small beginnings of a green library, a children’s book-swapping library and details of the Green Task Force, set up for doing good green things.

A back room is given over to artist-in-residence Jane Hawley, who makes mosaics from recycled crockery and runs workshops on art with an environmental bent for schools, clubs and whoever else is interested.

Out the back is a small garden with various demonstrations showing how to grow productive plants at home.

In one corner local knitting enthusiast Sue Craig is growing woad, weld and madder to make blue, yellow and red dies for wools.

Running the 48ft length of the garden is a “square foot garden” with 2ft set aside for plants suitable for each month of the year and in the centre is a small plot given over to campaign group Transition Brighton And Hove’s Grow Your Neighbours Own project, where keen gardeners are matched up with unused patches of land.

“Everything we’ve needed to make this happen has magically appeared,” says Mel. “It’s been brilliant.” Volunteers have come from all over, borrowed from other campaign groups or from a day centre for people with learning difficulties where Mel has worked.

All of them are excited about developing a community around the new centre and all agree if anyone was going to pull off a project like this, it would be Mel, who, they say, has all the perfect qualities: vision, patience, organisation skills and an ability to pull people together to work for a single aim.

But isn’t there already a similar project in town, the long-running Brighton Peace And Environment Centre?

“BPEC is very central,” says Mel. “Now there is a centre in the east and I look forward to seeing another one in the west.

“The environment agenda is more pressing than ever and there is lots of scope for everyone to do more. People need a community and a central hub.”

And that is exactly what has been created.

  • Visit www.thegreencentre.co.uk for more details.