7th October 2022

The Colne Valley Forum and Lottery Landscape Partnership Celebration

We would like to send our thanks to everyone who came along and celebrated with us last Thursday for the Colne Valley Forum and Lottery Landscape Partnership Celebration, held at Denham Grove Hotel.

We had three great presentations;

Jerry Unsworth, Planning Consultant, spoke about and highlighted the threats the Colne Valley Regional Park is facing and how the park is responding to them.

Debbie Valman, Programme Manager of the Lottery Landscape Partnership, spoke about the achievements and lessons learned of the whole Landscape Partnership Project.

Tim Hill from Herts and Middlesex Wildlife Trust and Tony Tony Booker from Colne Valley Fisheries Consultative presented together, showing us how good partnership work can achieve great things delivering the Angling and Nature Conservation project.

Future Plan

The Park has a higher profile and increased activity for the benefit of more than three million people who live within ten miles, in no small part due to the Lottery buying into and supporting the vision of the Partnership.

However, since the Landscape Partnership was conceived, that ‘landscape’, has changed considerably. Opportunities are presented by increased use of green space during the pandemic and the clear value that local communities place on the environment. Threats have significantly increased as the Park is facing a planning crisis due to a massive number of development proposals and being on the edge of local government boundaries.

In this increasingly challenging environment, we have proposed a “Future Plan” to the Heritage Lottery following on from the LLP as the next step to ensure the future of this unique, precious green space on the edge of our capital city. Over the next 9 months we will be working on advocacy and promoting the Regional Park, concentrating on those with influence to highlight the value of this precious landscape. We have a package of measures from talking to planning departments to encourage them to incorporate the Green Infrastructure Strategy in their local plans to producing updated GIS maps of the areas and conducting a wetland bird survey which will quantify the value of our wetland resource.

For more information about:

Threats in the Colne Valley Park, see our latest article here and here. 

Landscape Partnership Project, full project details can be found here.

Angling and Nature Conservation project updates can be found here.