The excellent book Irreplaceable: The Fight to Save Wild Places by Julian Hoffman shows what places can mean to local communities. I was struck by one example he gives: the fight to save North Kelvin Meadows in Glasgow. In the middle of a highly dense urban area, bordering a low-income working class community, lies a tiny piece of land, just 1.4 hectares. Glasgow City Council wanted to bulldoze it for a luxury housing development but locals fought back and won. The community now managed the site. From the website:
“The North Kelvin Meadow is a community group set up on 13 October 2008 to manage the green space between Clouston Street , Sanda Street and Kelbourne Street (G20 – North Kelvin Ward within Glasgow, Scotland).
We manage 1.4 hectares of meadow and woodland (500 trees) in the heart of Glasgow. Also within this land which we mange is: a community orchard of 30 fruit trees, 2 tree houses, 2 mud kitchens for young kids, 3 compost bins (including the big wooden Number 1 in the far Kelbourne street corner thats awaiting your compost material) , an Elves and Fairy corner in an old disused flood light housing unit, 30 raised beds each rented by a person or family per year to grow vegetables in, and a community allotment with 6 raised beds, 1 fire pit, 2 honey bee hives, 6 bumble bee homes, 2 deer (Ok they are wooden deer!) and many muddy puddles to play in!
We allow hands on experience regarding nature activities and believe this wild natural greenspace is of a great health benefit, both mental and physical, to this well built up area in Glasgow.
Glasgow and especially the area this land is located in needs a better connection between people and nature. Many of theses young kids for example have never been in a woodland environment. Nor have they ever picked fruit from an orchard tree or understand compost. They been in parks with avenues of planted trees but not a self seeded woodland and meadow. The area is predominantly high tenement flats with 8 flats in each block. They don’t normally have much of a garden, just a place for their communal bins. With Glasgow near the bottom of the health tables this land of ours is in the right place and providing the right solutions. Plus all this is done via a broad long standing constituted community group.
In 2020 Glasgow City Council has given a 25 year lease of the land, which means this land is protected from property developers etc and so we can now continue our work on behalf of the local community without the risk of being bulldozed.”
For more information about the history of how they managed to win see: https://northkelvinmeadow.com/about/
This is one example of a ‘Local Wildlife Site’. There are 42,000 in Britain, about the size of Devon. In 2018, the government removed these from the National PLanning Framework, the only protection available to these places. However, a campaign managed to get this reinstated. They are still very vunerable to development threats.
See: https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/news/some-protection-reinstated-risk-local-wildlife-sites
Land for What? Land for Whom? 