A message is in from Wandle Rain Gardens

Dear Ward Councillors

I would like to introduce you to a project that London Wildlife Trust is running with communities along the course of the Wandle in Sutton, Merton and Wandsworth.

The Wandle Rain Gardens project aims to increase resilience to climate change and flooding through creating small scale ‘sustainable urban drainage schemes’ (SuDS) with local communities, often focusing on estates managed by Registered Providers. These projects include creating rain gardens, building biodiverse green roofs with groups of volunteers, taking up impermeable surfaces to create free draining and wildlife-rich gardens and installing rainwater harvesting systems.

The project will showcase and raise awareness of household-scale ways in which people can work with nature to reduce flood risk and increase local resilience to climate change in a catchment of a dynamic and accessible river.

As well as creating SuDS as local demonstrations, we also run events to raise awareness of climate change and its predicted impacts on the Wandle, deliver training workshops to give community champions the skills and knowledge to go about creating their own SuDS and produce an informative guidance leaflet based on the local area to support people in making adaptations in their own gardens and communities (based on this one that we produced for a similar project LWT has been running in Lambeth since 2013).     The Wandle Rain Gardens project is currently funded for 12 months by the HLF through the Living Wandle Landscape Partnership. 

In Sutton we have engaged with residents of Bedzed to assist them with advice on their rainwater harvesting and ponding issues in their garden area.  We have also talked to Dani Ford, flood risk manager who has said that she will be able to use the community guidance leaflet.   We haven’t yet found a housing site that is interested in working with us to develop a SuDS scheme,  but if you are aware of anywhere that this might be possible I’d be very happy to know more.    

If you have any questions about the project, or would like to suggest ways that we can work with residents close to the Wandle please do not hesitate to contact me. 

Best wishes

Joanna Ecclestone, Wandle Rain Gardens Project Officer, London Wildlife Trust

I work on the Wandle Rain Gardens project on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. 

Centre for Wildlife Gardening, 28 Marsden Road, London SE15 4EE

Direct dial: 020 7252 9186

Mobile: 07891 004154

All our lives are better when they’re a bit wild. Share why wildlife and wild places matter to us all at www.mywildlife.org.uk