Britain’s wildest weed grows

While other countries relax their laws on cannabis, here in the UK growing cannabis is a strictly covert affair. Many small-time home growers will simply make do with a bit of loft space, a spare room or a basement. For those with more ambitious plans, seeking out a secretive space in which to raise your crops can need a little lateral thinking.

It’s safe to say that the enterprising farmers in our green and pleasant land aren’t scared of getting creative, over recent years cannabis grows have been uncovered in some strange and unusual places. Here are some of our favourites.

Nuclear Bunker

If you’re looking for somewhere secure to cultivate your crops and avoid the long arm of the law, you might think a genuine military-built nuclear bunker would be as safe as it gets.

One group of enterprising gardeners had the same thought, setting up a whopping crop in RGHQ Chilmark, a disused MOD bunker built in the 1980s to protect government officials in the event of a nuclear attack.

The bunker-based grow spanned 20 rooms and contained several thousand plants. It was almost the perfect setup too, with cops saying the military-grade blast doors made the building “almost completely impenetrable”.

To date, this is one of the largest grow-ops ever discovered in the UK, and they would have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for those pesky pigs.

Police Station

In a classic case of the old double-bluff, Police in Failsworth, Oldham discovered another huge weed farm in a disused Police Station.

These growers clearly thought that hiding in plain sight was a surefire strategy to avoid police attention, and again, it nearly worked. According to a statement from GMP Failsworth & Hollinwood, the operation wasn’t raided by to cops. Police only attended the building as they’d been reported as ‘unsecured’ – on entering, all they found was evidence that the building had been broken into and stripped out, possibly by rival growers.

While the plants were nowhere to be seen, the remaining equipment was donated to a local charity.

Legoland

Legoland in Windsor is one of the UK’s busiest theme parks, attracting 2.4 million visitors in 2022. All of that footfall didn’t seem to bother two ambitious growers who made use of an unused building on the site to set up a 50-plant grow.

The plants were discovered in a disused cottage close to the entrance of the main park on land owned by the Crown Estate. Anyone sneaking over royal fields to grow weed in Legoland deserves a mention.

In a haystack

As the saying goes most people are usually searching for a needle in a haystack. In rural Staffordshire, hay bales were used to conceal a large-scale grow room filled with more than 400 plants.

To the unsuspecting eye, the hay barn looked like any other. So well concealed was the grow that police said: “A tractor was needed to remove the bales to reveal the entrance to the numerous growing and drying rooms. It was a professional operation.”

The Bank of England

A little creative licence is needed here but the Dank of England puns write themselves for this sizeable operation located right next door to the UK’s central bank.

Set up in a disused pub, a crop of 826 flowering plants was found during lockdown, with the growers clearly hoping to take advantage of quiet streets in the countries financial heartland.

According to reports, this was the first ever cannabis grow discovered in the Square Mile.