We live in a neighbourhood that for many years has been marginalised – which not only affects the decisions made about people’s lives but also the environment we live, play and work in.
Just as our neighbours include the wildlife we share space with, our heritage too goes far beyond the industry that has always surrounded our neighbourhood. It includes the trees planted here, buddleia growing from cracks and insects and birds that come and go from empty sites that now stand proud as urban woodlands.
The local area where The Portland Inn Project is based neighbours a large-scale industrial site, which omits noise and some air pollutants.
This is mitigated by the large Brownfield next door, some sections of which have been growing for more than 20 years. The city council have recently given initial planning permission for over 300 homes to be built on this site, which will have a significant impact on the ecology but will provide useful housing locally. Through this, we have become aware of the need to begin to map and track local ecologies, in order to understand any loss of biodiversity that may occur and to work with the housing developer, as well as programming interventions with our community to build in opportunities for nature within the new development plans and through the work we do to improve our neighbourhood.
Environmental Intervention
As an organisation, we are currently looking at the ways that we work, and have developed an environmental policy to inform what we do in the coming years. As part of that we aim to introduce a seasonal eco-auditing process, in order to map and track how environmental interventions locally impact on local wildlife and nature. We learned through the work we have been doing that there is a lack of survey culture in deprived neighbourhoods in terms of citizens providing ecological sightings to local records, and as a result there is very little biodiversity data for neighbourhoods like ours. This is one of the reasons we started mapping our local biodiversity through The Portland Palissy Ware – find out more in The Clay End.
Gardening Club
We have a weekly Gardening Club run by team member Katrina Wilde. This is a space for us to learn and grow together. From food to fruit, dye plants to healing ones, we’re bringing more beauty across our neighbourhood through communal gardening! If you’re local and would like to join us, send us an email or come along to one of our sessions, usually on a Saturday! Come along for a chat, a bit of gentle gardening and to meet new people too.
The 100 Year Plan
Our Community’s 100 Year Plan is an important mark of our commitment to long term, sustainable planning and action for our neighbourhood. This is a critical step towards environmental justice for inner city, residential communities like ours. Visit theonehundredyearplan.com.