What if London National Park City was greener, healthier, wilder and more beautiful?
What would it look like?
What would it be like?
We’re calling for optimists to help visualise a hopeful and possible future for the region and to share their vision in our Prize to Transform the Future. It's been established by London National Park City, the region’s Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty and National Parks, along with Ordnance Survey and Culture Declares.
Judges include Surrey based artists Ackroyd & Harvey, Hampshire based landscape architect Merrick Denton-Thompson, London based climate change lawyer and activist Farhana Yamin, Somerset nature conservationist Mya-Rose Craig and London based adventurer Dwayne Fields with many more to be announced from across different parts of the region and with different interests.
Dan Raven-Ellison, founder of the London National Park City, said:
“I hope lots of people will be inspired to rise to this challenge. This may not be a financial Prize, but the potential reward is something much greater, deeper and longer lasting than that. We are currently facing a number of urgent wake up calls. Our health, our ecology and our climate are all entwined in states of emergency that threaten our lives and livelihoods. We need bold and positive visions that we can get behind to restore our futures and make life better for ourselves and future generations.”
Artist Heather Ackroyd said:
“The arts have a tradition of sparking cultural change and ‘speaking differently’: disrupting the status quo and creating emergent space for new ideas to engage people at an imaginative level. Here, the vision to transform the future is all about imaginatively creating those wilder and greener emergent spaces and putting ecology and nature right at the centre of the bigger cultural landscape.”
Rob Fairbanks, the Surrey Hills Director states:
"We live in one of the most beautiful and diverse regions in the world with its wonderful landscapes of farmland, woodland, common, heath and downland. We are part of this landscape and dependent on it for our food, water, clean air and well-being. In a time of so much change and anxiety, we hope The Prize can be a powerful opportunity to visualise a healthier future for ourselves in greater harmony with our natural environment."
Full details on how to enter the competition can be found here. The competition Twitter page is here. Please use the hashtag #PrizeToTransformTheFuture
I saw this uncredited image on Twitter and the first thing that sprang to mind was "raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens..." . The Sound of Music is one of those films passed on in our genes, deeply embedded in the cultural soul of everyone in the world. The sacrilege of the Von Trapp children dressed in their curtains being ordered home led me to consider in my self-isolation just what precisely are some of my favourite things?
My brief daily walk is important to me on many levels beyond fresh air and exercise. It's a change of scene away from the confines of my home. It's a moment in time where I am back in the world, isolated by my physical distancing, but not alone. I become part of society again and every second matters. I've started to notice things like one cluster of leaves that sprouted before all the others on a tree; the graffiti that everyone on my walk pauses to photograph; the difference in the crops sown a couple of days apart but side-by-side. These have become a few of my #favouritethings.
Alongside this are some of the things that matter, I mean really matter. The NHS workers, my bins being emptied, the people working in my local shop, the food banks and the acts of random kindness, or the very human but unexpected interventions of others who've planted-up tree pits or chalked the names of trees on park paths. These become #favouritethings as examples of the best of humanity.
Coronavirus has brutally torn away lives, but it has also brutally revealed some home truths about who in society is really important when things go wrong, and it's laid bare the inequalities and divisions in society. Living in a National Park City is about a common aim of making life better for all.
Protecting human life is paramount but access to, and connecting with, nature is important for our health. Natural England, the Government's environmental advisors, state that everyone should be within a 5 minute walk or 300 metres of a green space about the size of two football pitches. It's clear that many Londoners in flats or rented rooms do not have that luxury. In an urban setting these distances may need shrinking, or have better public transport links and cycle routes. London needs more green space for the physical and mental well-being of Londoners. Natural England's recomendations also state we should all have:
- at least one accessible 20 hectare site (approximately 20 football pitches) within 2km of home
- one accessible 100 hectare site within 5km of home
- one accessible 500 hectare site within 10km of home
The drastic changes imposed upon us to manage coronavirus show rapid change is possible and governments and institutions have the power to make it happen. So let's share our #favouritethings, the things that really matter in life. Let's agree what we want for the future when we emerge from isolation, so we can create a truly green, healthy and wild London for all. #BuildBackBetter.
Post and tag your #Favouritethings on our Twitter or Facebook pages.
2020 AC – After Coronavirus – still feels a long way away but plans are being laid now to pick-up the pieces.
Leading politicians, economists, scientists and Institutions like the World Health Organisation and the United Nations have already linked poor habitat management, climate change and the increased risk of new viruses spreading.
The International Monetary Fund has reassessed the prospect for growth for 2020 and 2021, declaring that we have entered a recession – as bad as or worse than in 2009. Now the UN is calling for action to put people, the environment and the most vulnerable first. They say what’s needed is a large-scale, coordinated and comprehensive multilateral response amounting to at least 10 per cent of global GDP.
In an open letter to world leaders, the Secretary-General of the UN, António Guterres says:
“Everything we do during and after this crisis must be with a strong focus on building more equal, inclusive and sustainable economies and societies that are more resilient in the face of pandemics, climate change, and the many other global challenges we face.”
Our collective experiences of working from home and all the changes we’ve had to adapt to can help shape what happens next. Many companies and services have become casualties of the changes. Our economy, infrastructure and even how or why we travel will need to be reconsidered as we decide how we rebuild our society and interactions in a post coronavirus world.
World Parks Week is looming, from Saturday 25th April through to Sunday 3rd May. We’ll probably still be in self-isolation mode in the UK, but it’s an opportunity to exchange views and consider alternative futures. #NatureNeverCloses
73 per cent of children and 81 per cent of adults reported being concerned about the decline in nature to the National Trust's Noticing Nature report. It also found that 90 per cent of children in the UK infrequently or never watched the sunrise.
There is lots we can start doing now, from small acts of kindness to policy and infrastructure changes. See our Things to do pages for inspiration.
What if people and the environment were placed alongside the economy at the centre of our governance?
What if improving national happiness and health were government requirements?
What if we were able to distribute the plants and trees from closed-down nurseries to communities or schools?
What if key workers in essential services were permanently recognised and rewarded for their work?
What if we made life greener, healthier and wilder?
What if airline subsidies were transferred to public transport?
Raise these in discussion with your MP. You can find them here or talk with your local councillors.
There could be roles for the current community or MutualAid groups set-up to support people during the coronavirus outbreak.
We’re exploring ways our soon-to-be-revealed National Park City Rangers can support communities. We’d welcome your #buildbackbetter thoughts, so please do share discussions and ideas with us through our social media feeds or via email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Urban farming is expanding fast and is incorporating both new and old technologies. A factory in Japan uses LED lights and robots to grow 30,000 lettuces a day in giant vertical racks with no soil. Here in London, some farming’s gone underground, with food grown in disused tunnels, from mushrooms to salad shoots.
There are several community food schemes in the capital, like Organiclea in east London, a community food growing and delivery enterprise. Sales of plant seeds have ballooned in the last few weeks. Growing food or flowers from home can be done even if you don’t have a garden. Salad crops can be grown on windowsills inside. Outdoors you can use balconies, pots, bags, raised beds and planters or an area of your garden or community space. It’s educational too.
There are some 700 farms within Greater London and thriving food businesses. Some offering training and opportunities like Bees and Refugees in Hammersmith and Fulham, which aims to have some 20 active bee colonies producing urban honey. And of course, London has numerous breweries and distilleries making beers, spirits and more recently, hand sanitiser.
Allotments are keenly sought yet the amount of land used for urban allotments has dropped by 65% across the UK in half a century, and the decline has been eight times worse in poorer areas.
Academics at the Institute for Sustainable Food at the University of Sheffield say the peak of land dedicated to allotments was in the 1940s to 1960s. By 2016, just over a quarter of all the area historically recorded as allotments was still allotment land, and almost half (47.9%) being built on. They estimate the lost land could have grown an average of 2,500 tonnes of food per year in each city.
Lead author Miriam Dobson said: “Growing our own fruit and veg has huge benefits for people’s health and well-being and can contribute to local food security while simultaneously improving our environment. Our findings strengthen the case for preserving existing plots and boosting growing space, particularly in deprived areas, to share those benefits more fairly across our cities.”
Julian, our London National Park City allotment keeper, offers this advice:
- Copy. Look to see what neighbouring plot holders have done and what is successful in terms of location, soil, solar aspect. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
- Slow and steady. Don’t rush, it will take a few years to work our what’s best for you and your plot.
- Plan before planting. Think seasonal variety.
- Dig or No Dig? Raised beds? There are lots of opinions online and in books so take your pick and see what works.
- Low maintenance or high maintenance. Garlic has been brilliant for me and we are now self-sufficient on an annual basis.
- I’m aiming to have half my plot as recurring produce/ flowers and half as annuals planted each year.
- Don’t plant too much of the same thing at the same time or you just get a glut. If sowing from seed, sow some one week and more the following week to get succession planting. Some produce can be frozen but not all.
- If fellow plot holders offer you spare plants/seedlings, brilliant but remember to swap or exchange favours.
- Consider small (dwarf) fruit trees.
- Netting on fruit cages - some against due to trapped birds.
- Sheds/Greenhouses. Check to see if you can have one. Think carefully about what you need it for and where to place it in your plot. Mine is a Potting Shed so does both storage and growing.
