A mosaic of woodland, brook and grassland on the edge of Ealing, home to badgers, slow worms, tawny owls and song thrushes, Grove Farm is the kind of wild place that only survives if the people who love it speak up for it. Right now, it needs us to.
Stand almost anywhere on Grove Farm and there isn’t much of London in sight. You feel like you’re in the countryside. If the development we’re fighting goes ahead, it won’t be for much longer.
That feeling is what drew me to Grove Farm, and what has kept me coming back. It’s why I helped form the Friends of Grove Farm, which then led me to become a London National Park City ranger. I’m writing this because part of the site is now under threat from development, and I don’t want us to lose it.
By Michael Pilkington, London National Park City Ranger, and Chair of the Friends of Grove Farm
A nature reserve hiding in plain sight
What makes Grove Farm special is its variety. It is a mosaic of habitats stitched together: rough grassland, scrub and woodland, including a section that indicates ancient woodland. In spring, one of our woodland paths is flooded by wood anemones, their white flowers opening to the sun. It is quite possibly one of the largest patches of wood anemones in London.
The wildlife is just as rich. Badgers roam the site after dark and tawny owls call from the trees. Green woodpeckers bound across the meadow in their dipping flight to feed on yellow meadow ants, whose anthills dot the grassland – a sure sign of how undisturbed and biodiverse it is. There’s a good population of slow worms, too, which the London Amphibian and Reptile Group come regularly to see.
It is a place full of beautiful, thriving wildlife, and it already carries three of the strongest protections our planning system offers. It’s a Local Nature Reserve, looked after both for wildlife and for people to enjoy nature close to home. It’s a Site of Importance for Nature Conservation, or SINC, one of the network of sites the Mayor of London and the boroughs recognise as London’s most valuable places for wildlife. And it’s Metropolitan Open Land, which is protected as strongly as the Green Belt.
Coston’s Brook: a green highway for wildlife
Running along the western edge of the development, in a steep-sided wooded valley, is Coston’s Brook. It’s a wildlife corridor: a sheltered, unlit route that lets animals move through Grove Farm. Badgers forage across the site after dark, and bats use this brookside treeline to feed and commute.
That strip is part of something bigger. Grove Farm is a stepping stone in a patchwork of local green spaces, letting wildlife move between them to feed, shelter and find new ground. These connections are exactly what nature needs to survive in a city, and they are recognised in policy. The London Nature Recovery Strategy, devised by the Mayor of London to set out where nature should be protected and restored across the capital, treats SINCs like Grove Farm as essential links in that network.
How the Friends of Grove Farm began
Like a lot of people during the pandemic, my partner and I went looking for somewhere green nearby, and stumbled across Grove Farm. Those spaces were a lifeline for so many of us during lockdown, a reminder of how much our wellbeing depends on having somewhere wild close to home. We found a wonderful site, but also a lot of litter and fly-tipping. We contacted our local councillor, who suggested to us why don’t you step up.
So we did. Starting by litter picking and then moving on to set up the Friends of Grove Farm, with the aim of bringing the community together to care for the site and win grants to improve it for nature. One grant was the Mayor of London’s Rewild London Fund, money set aside specifically to look after SINCs because City Hall recognises they are the backbone of London’s wildlife network. It funded a management plan and hands-on work to improve the meadows and woodland.
Community is at the heart of everything we do. What I value most is welcoming people in to experience nature on their doorstep through activities like nature walks, slow worm safaris, bat walks, photography mornings and conservation days. For many it’s a surprise to find this much life thriving so close to home.
What’s being proposed
It’s because we know and love this place that the development being proposed for it is so hard to accept. The developers behind the scheme want to build towers ranging from eleven to sixteen storeys. Three of them would sit right down on the banks of Coston’s Brook, in the very corridor I described earlier. The development would see 158 trees felled. It would also bring far more people and dogs right to the edge of the reserve, which the developers’ own ecologists admit would seriously disturb the badgers that live here, enough, their report concedes, to put the local population at risk. Furthermore, the woodland edge would be lit up from all the flats. Light, their own report accepts, would drive away the bats that forage and commute there now. Add to this shadow and excessive wind funneling that these towers would create, the effects on the site overall will be stark. Academic research suggesting the loss of plants and flowers, in turn affecting the insects that feed on them, culminating in the loss of foraging that bats and birds rely upon.
We are not against building. Part of the wider site is an existing car park, and we’ve never opposed sensible development there, as long as it isn’t out of scale and doesn’t harm the nature around it. What we cannot accept is towers pushed onto the wildlife site itself, and this wildlife corridor can’t simply be recreated somewhere else.
When we filmed our video with London National Park City, John Wells, a naturalist who leads our nature walks here, joined us. That evening he heard song thrushes, blackcaps and robins singing across areas now under threat. “I love this place,” he said. “It is wonderful.”
Losing twice over
Under the Environment Act 2021, every major development must now deliver at least a 10% “biodiversity net gain”. It has to leave nature measurably better off than it found it. By the developers’ own assessment, this scheme does the opposite. Their figures show the site’s biodiversity value falling by around 30% and the brook’s by two-thirds. Their own report concludes it fails the legal 10% test.
To plug that gap, they would have to buy “biodiversity credits” elsewhere. But Ealing has no biodiversity “bank” of its own, so the money, and the nature it is meant to pay for, would go to another part of the country entirely. We would lose twice over: the green space here, and the investment that should have repaired what is left.
And the homes offered in return? This is where it becomes technical. Developments on Metropolitan Open Land (or ex Metropolitan Open Land) such as Grove Farm are expected to offer 50% of the homes as affordable homes, although the development is attempting to utilise the “fast track” method which lowers the requirement of affordable housing to 35%.
In the world of Affordable housing, If you are under the impression that the required percentage of housing is simply based on a percentage of the flats being designated ‘social rent’ or ‘rent to buy’, you’d be wrong (by this calculation the development would deliver around 18% flats as affordable). The government prefers to use a different measure – habitable rooms. This is the number of bedrooms across the development, plus their living rooms as a percentage of the development. For instance a three bed flat has four habitable rooms. By this measure the calculation for affordable housing in the development increases to 26%. In short, whichever method is used to calculate affordable housing and the percentage that the developer should deliver, they fall short of what is required.
“Developers look at this from a financial side,” as John puts it. “I look at the earth. We have millions of other organisms we’re meant to share it with, and all we humans seem to do is wipe it out for our own selfish needs. Why should we do that?”
Green spaces need support
The ask here is reasonable, and it’s winnable. We’re not asking for the impossible. Under the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006, strengthened by the Environment Act 2021, councils in England have a legal duty not just to protect biodiversity but to actively enhance it through the decisions they make. Ealing has already committed to exactly that here: its own Biodiversity Action Plan identifies Grove Farm’s woodland as a place to restore, and with the Mayor’s Rewild London Fund and the council’s own rangers, we’ve been doing precisely that by improving the woodland and meadows, lifting biodiversity across the site. Constructing towers that would degrade the very same woodland cuts against all of it. We’re asking Ealing to honour that duty, along with the protections this site already holds under the Mayor’s London Plan, by refusing a scheme that would build into this wildlife site and loom over it. Grove Farm needs a proper buffer, meaning space between the towers and the nature reserve, so it isn’t overshadowed or flooded with light.
What we need is for people to speak up. A wild place like Grove Farm doesn’t only belong to the people who live beside it. It’s part of the patchwork of wild places that belongs to every Londoner, and spaces like it survive only when people across the city choose to defend them. When no one does, it’s all too easy for a place to be treated as if it isn’t needed.
Grove Farm is needed, by the badgers and slow worms and song thrushes, and by everyone who has ever stood among its trees and felt the city fall away. Here’s how you can help:
Sign the petition — there’s one specifically about protecting the Metropolitan Open Land: https://c.org/PLnnFL6vq5
Join us at the Friends of Grove Farm for volunteering days, nature walks, bat walks and slow worm safaris: https://www.friendsofgrovefarm.org/
Grove Farm is a wild place on the edge of Ealing worth standing up for. Let’s do London differently.
