Thames Water Help Fund A Two Year River Project!

We are thankful to Thames Water for helping us to fund a project similar to Young Roots where their funding will help us to work with local people to improve nine sites along the river from Desborough and The Hughenden Quarter to Bourne End.  This project will have an all age focus (Young Roots was predominantly designed for Young People) including our team, Allen Beechey from Chilterns Conservation Board, artist Dan Wilson and Gary and Scott from Highway Productions who will be back together, giving volunteers opportunities to develop their river conservation, artistic, filming and interviewing skills throughout the project. Please contact us and follow us on Facebook so that you don’t miss out!  This project is headed up by our Education and Community Projects Manager, Paul Stack and began in 2019.  Let Paul know if you run a community group who might like to come out with us en masse and join in.

We ran two of three launch sessions at WDC’s land Kingsmead Park by our depot in January 2019 and our new river volunteer team now has up to 20 regular river volunteers. The first session was attended by some of the regulars and 60 students from the neighbouring Loudwater combined school. We have further sessions booked there: A Be a Ranger Taster Session with the neighbouring Kingsmead Business Park in Jan 2019 and a community litter clearance and planting session in March 2019.   We secured funding from Wycombe District Council and Greggs to make the Thames Water funding go further and do more at Kingsmead than planned.

So far we have achieved 900 metres squared of scrub cleared, 150m squared of tree thinning and safety work, 180m squared of hazel coppiced and we have cleared 6 bags of rubbish.  We have also created approximately 30 inspiring art boards to be used by Loudwater School in their wildlife areas and bird boxes and bat boxes made to be put up in school and along the river.

See photos of the session with Loudwater School below.

.