Tag Archives: Planning

New job at SERT delivering river restoration!

A new opportunity has opened up to work with us in physical river restoration and delivery of catchment wide enhancements.

The scope of the position has now been expanded to allow applications at both Project Officer or Senior Project Officer level.

HackbridgeBefore  HackbridgeAfter

The job description can be found here: JobDescription_ProjectsOfficerSeniorProjectsOfficer_RR

And the application form here:Application_ProjectsOfficerOrSeniorProjectsOfficerRiverRestoration

To apply, please send your completed application form, together with a copy of your CV (2 pages max.) to jobs@southeastriverstrust.org before 9am on Tuesday 30th June 2015. Interviews will be held on Friday 3rd July. Second interviews, if held, will be on Wednesday 8th July 2015.

Beddington Park: Add Your Voice!

This year there is a Heritage Lottery Fund project to restore Beddington Park, including the lakes and the River Wandle. The Wandle Trust have been involved in developing the bid with Sutton Council, providing expertise and guidance.

If you’re a user of Beddington Park or live close by, please take the time to complete this short survey to add your voice to how you use the Park and how you’d like to see it improved!

Click here to take the survey

Welcome to our new Invasive Species Officer!

We’d like to give a warm welcome to our latest recruit Alan, our new Invasive Non-Native Species Officer!

Polly and Alan

We’ve stolen Alan from Scotland where he was working on Argyll’s three National Nature Reserves for Scottish Natural Heritage. Before this Alan was in Cape Town, South Africa, controlling invasive species in the metropolitan area so he has a wealth of experience.

Alan is running an invasive species project on the River Wandle as part of the Living Wandle Landscape Partnership. The project aims to map invasive species along the Wandle corridor and set up management plans and volunteer teams to work towards eradication.

Alan will be tackling a wide variety of invasive non-native species including some well-known faces such as Himalayan balsam, Japanese knotweed and giant hogweed.

Himalayan balsam

To get started, Alan has been taking a refresher in Pesticide Application along with Polly our Volunteer Officer. Here is our invasive species ghost busting team…

INS

So who you gonna call?

Alan and Polly!

Photo Credit: Himalayan balsam, GBNNSS

What does the Wandle mean to you?

You have the chance to have your say in how the Wandle is managed in the future. 

The Environment Agency has published draft River Basin Management Plans for every river in the UK and they want to hear your opinion!

To help you get involved and add your voice, WWF have created an easy way to make your opinions heard.

Got a couple of minutes? Answers these quick 5 questions. 

Got a bit longer? Give us more detail on what you value to be important to your local river here. 

Share this with your friends and family – #SAVEOURWATERS

 

Coming back to Croydon: another big win for the Wandle!

We always knew there had to be some point in playing the National Lottery so assiduously…

… and now it’s all becoming clear… with a whopping £2m just awarded by the Heritage Lottery and Big Lottery funds to join Croydon’s earlier £400,000 Parks for People win, plus £1m from Barrett Homes in addition to their own deculverting scheme…

… to put the Wandle back into Wandle Park for the first time in 40 years.

As our good friend Dave Webb from the Environment Agency said in the Council’s own press release:

“Opening up this culverted section of the Wandle will restore the river as the focal point of the park and provide a wonderful environment for people and wildlife. It will be a shining example of how to improve a local park while also managing flood risk, assisting with adaptation to climate change and creating a healthy river.”

We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.  Now, all we’ll need to do is sort out the urban runoff and other diffuse pollution problems from the rest of those culverts under Croydon…

The Wandle’s a winner in Croydon!

Before Christmas we urged you to vote for your favourite park in Croydon to be in with a chance of sharing the £1.5 million available.  Four of these parks were along the River Wandle or its tributary the Norbury Brook and we are very pleased to say that all four were amongst the winners of the ‘Parks to be Proud of’ initiative!

Wandle Park, Thornton Heath Recreation Ground, Norbury Park and Waddon Ponds are amongst nine parks to share the prize money, which is spent over and above ongoing programmes of general works and Croydon council will shortly be asking local people what they would like to see happen in these parks.

Removing litter from the Norbury Brook through Thornton Heath Recreation Ground

If you’re asked, please do think of the Wandle and Norbury Brook and how they might be improved, for example, by helping to bring the Wandle above ground through Wandle Park, or by restoring the Norbury Brook which currently runs in a concrete ditch alongside Thornton Heath Recreation Ground and underneath Norbury Park.

Vote for the Wandle in Croydon

The London Borough of Croydon is asking the public to vote for their favourite park in Croydon.  A total of £1.5 million will be divided up between the top choices and you’ll be able to have a say in how that money is spent. You don’t have to be a Croydon resident to vote but each person can only vote once.

Wandle Park, Croydon

We are hoping that Wandle Park will be amongst the winners as the funding will help to bring the River Wandle, which is currently culverted under the park, back to the surface.  Some money has already been secured for this (e.g. through the Mayor’s Parks’ funding) but more is needed for it to become a reality. 

Wandle Park from the Air

There are other parks along the Wandle and its tributary the Norbury Brook (Norbury Park, Thornton Heath Recreation Ground and Waddon Ponds) and we would like to encourage people voting for these parks to suggest that any winnings include plans to improve the river or brook.

You can read more about the ‘Parks to be Proud of’ competition and place your vote here before 24th December.

Wandle parks: it’s green for go

Whichever way you look at it, the River Wandle has had a tough week – with one pollution scare rapidly followed by another that proved much worse.

But amidst all the phone calls and urgent investigations, we’ve still been cheered by good news for the green spaces around the river.

First came welcome news that Sutton Council has signed up to creating the Wandle Valley Regional Park – a long-term vision for an 8,000-acre green corridor along the full length of the Wandle, with many benefits for biodiversity, local people’s quality of life, and even the economy.

Many of our project partners in the Wandle Forum – particularly Groundwork – have worked tirelessly to reach this stage of the process, and we’re thrilled to see the plans achieving real progress and publicity.

Better still, the Mayor of London has just announced the results of the Help a London Park vote (captioned “You vote, we makeover”) with a £400,000 win for Wandle Park in Croydon.

wandle11

(Image: Help a London Park)

As a result, the dedicated Friends of Wandle Park can now push forward with plans to break the river out of its deep concrete culvert under the park.

This news couldn’t be better for an area of the Wandle catchment that’s had a lot of airtime on this blog recently (and with good, barely-suppressed-angry, polluted reason).  The more of the Wandle we can all bring back to Croydon, the better we can keep an eye on it… and the healthier we hope it will be.  

Trout in the Classroom being released by local kids in Wandle Park, where there’s currently no river at all? 

You betcha, Mayor Johnson

Bringing the Wandle back to Croydon

third-city-vision-smc-alsop-2007

(Image: croydonthirdcity.co.uk)

In an article in today’s Financial Times, dramatically titled Knock it down and start again, we’re reminded of the sheer scale of architect Will Alsop’s plans for regenerating Croydon, the major conurbation on the Wandle’s headwaters.

As part of these plans:

Alsop intends to shrink the monstrous carriageway (through the centre of Croydon) and build modern covered walkways above it and to unearth the river Wandle, making it a focal point for a number of new and accessible parks.

It’s a welcome display of blue-sky (blue-water?) thinking for Croydon, where miles of upper Wandle carriers were culverted over when they turned into open sewers in the 19th century, and became a horrible health hazard for local residents.

But in the meantime – and whatever happens to Alsop’s grand designs – it’s worth remembering that efforts to bring the Wandle back to this borough are already underway. 

On the New South Quarter brownfield development by Barratt Homes, the Environment Agency are supervising a careful deculverting and river restoration exercise (especially sensitive due to the site’s contaminated history as an fuel plant).

Just upstream, the Friends of Wandle Park are working with Croydon Council on plans for daylighting the river from the concrete culvert where it was buried as recently as 1967.

Needless to say, we’re always delighted to see the Wandle as a focus of this nationally-important urban regeneration story.

Healthy rivers spring from healthy headwaters. And healthy, free-flowing headwaters, not urban runoff in underground pipes, are just one of the Wandle’s key requirements for a properly sustainable future.