We launched the Nature in Your Neighbourhood project at our HuG Festival this June and immediately attracted interest from across the Moorlands. We were always keen to give people as many visual keys as possible – to bring the project to life. We’re glad to say that Foxlowe visitors flocked to the project map, which was on a stall ably staffed by Angie Turner of Keele University and Briony Davison of Staffordshire Wildlife Trust (plus Briony’s dog Finn!) Since then, we have taken the map around the Moorlands, including recently to the Leek and District Agricultural Show.
Nature in Your Neighbourhood, spearheaded by Staffordshire Wildlife Trust, has MCA, Keele University, OUTSIDE Arts, Staffordshire Moorlands District Council and Staffordshire Council Voluntary Youth Services as partners. Its key aims are to enhance biodiversity in the Moorlands as well as calculate and demonstrate its impact on climate change.
For this five-year project, funded by the National Lottery Community Fund, we start by asking residents to nominate potential sites this year. The partnership will then help communities or a group to manage the sites better. Support will include Bioblitzes, training in ecological monitoring and management and, where necessary, any negotiations with landowners.
A core of sites will be monitored by Keele University to measure the effects on carbon emissions (there is surprisingly little science on this subject at this level), although we intend that the project will be flexible, allowing the widest range of groups to take part, perhaps at different levels. Outside Arts will help organise arts and events around the project.
When the project is drawing to a close (a number of years yet!) the partners will produce a toolkit for similar endeavours across the country, drawing on the lessons we have learnt.
While we hope that a wide variety of green spaces will be managed through Nature in Your Neighbourhood, we have always had an eye out for roadside verges, typically massacred each year by the County Council mowing juggernaut. Previous attempts by us and others to introduce more sensitive management of a few selected sites have been frustrated by a variety of obstacles, including bureaucracy, complicated ownership structures and trench mad utilities.
So, it was a particular joy to have Val Riley at Hug. Val has recently received an MBE for her work as a volunteer with Staffs Wildlife Trust and twenty years ago surveyed a selection of verges across the district. This work was lodged with the Staffordshire Ecological Record and little work has been done on these sites since. MCA Nature Group members recently met with Val and the detailed work she did then is now enjoying a second life. We hope that at least some will now come under the Nature in Your Neighbourhood project.
So, do you have a site in mind where, working together, we can improve the habitats – maybe a roadside verge allowed to develop a range of flowering species, or an area of parish council greenspace that could be turned into a thriving wildlife-rich wetland? If so, please complete our online form and we'll be in touch to chat about it. Please note that sites must fall within the Staffordshire Moorlands District Council boundary and the deadline for site submissions is 11.59pm on 31 December.
Don't have any land in mind, but are keen to be involved? Send an email to SWT at