The White Peaks café at Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew could be knocked down and turned into a learning centre. 

The café has been shut since 2021 after it was replaced by the Family Kitchen and Shop and an application has been put in to Richmond Borough Council to demolish the building and replace it. 

The plan is to instead put a learning centre in its place to attempt to attract more secondary school children to visit the gardens. 

A spokesperson for Kew Gardens said to the Local Democracy Reporting service: "White Peaks has been closed since we opened the Family Kitchen & Shop at Kew Gardens in 2021.  

"Next to the popular Children's Garden, which opened in 2019, the Family Kitchen & Shop is a multi-sensory eatery offering families a place to eat and drink, but also to engage with the natural world and learn more about where food comes from, discovering the important role which plants and fungi play in all our lives. 

"A learning centre on the site of White Peaks will allow us to provide a bespoke and fit-for-purpose learning space, designed to facilitate first-class learning opportunities and inspire a range of audiences – early years, school pupils and teachers, adults, community, and access groups. 

"One of our priorities in Kew's Manifesto for Change is to inspire the next generation, we aim to increase the numbers of secondary school pupils visiting Kew Gardens and encourage them to consider plant and fungal science as a career choice, and we hope to enable expansion of learning programmes at Kew onsite through increased indoor space and offsite through live streaming plant science lessons to pupils and teachers in the UK and internationally." 

A planning date has not yet been confirmed by the council to make a decision on the application. 

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