The Colne Valley Regional Park
The annual forum at Uxbridge Golf Course on 15th May was a really interesting day spent with our partners, explaining about our work and concerns and hearing their views on how we can work collectively to protect, promote and enhance our precious regional park.
Do you know what a long way eels journey to migrate? They come all the way from the other side of the Atlantic to England and then they trek all the way back again. But when they are journeying along our English rivers, what happens when someone puts an airport in their way?
The Annual Friends meeting was held on Monday 17th March 2025 at the Visitor centre in Denham. This was a fun meeting to attend as the main purpose was a celebration to say thank you!
We remain publicly and determinedly opposed to the plans to expand Heathrow Airport, which will cut the Park in two, changing it for ever. 1200 acres of Green Belt will be lost and many more hundreds of acres will be built over by displaced existing businesses, and for new facilities to serve a bigger Heathrow. What’s more, five rivers will be put into 2km-long tunnels or diverted, cutting connections for wildlife between the internationally-rare chalk streams of the Chilterns and the Thames.
The countryside on the edge of large cities is crucially important for both people and wildlife. Recent changes to national planning policy threaten the Colne Valley and other areas like it. Yet with this threat could come the opportunity to create the best managed and best connected green corridor around any city in Europe. We need to fight for the countryside on your doorstep.
The grim prospect of expansion and a third runway at Heathrow is back on the agenda, which poses a direct threat to the Colne Valley Regional Park, which has already borne the brunt of a variety of infrastructure projects – such as HS2 – that have fundamentally and permanently altered this precious landscape.
In partnership with SEGRO, Groundwork South have completed another Green Skills Team Project in Slough. This is a six-week programme in which unemployed individuals from the Slough area spend two days a week developing practical conservation skills and also attend sessions to improve their employability.
This Christmas why not consider increasing quality time together, encourage outdoor activity or begin a journey of wildlife love and discovery. Take your family outside this December and celebrate Christmas traditions outside in nature.
Corporate Volunteers from Mace Group have been continuing to support the Colne Valley Regional Park in the management of three ancient woodlands in Denham over a number of years. This year we are excited to be rolling this out to other nearby woods so we can improve more woodland habitat on a wider landscape scale.
There is a wealth of books available to help people learn more about the environment around them, making exploration on the ground so much more rewarding. The following titles are recommended merely as a taster that will help you understand how and why your local patch of ‘England’s Green and Pleasant Land’ looks and functions in the way it does.
