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08 November 2022

The power of green – breathing new life into our towns and cities

With a growing focus worldwide on the need for all of us to reduce our carbon footprint and live more sustainably, making the most of our green spaces – wherever they may be – must surely be a crucial part of our response to environmental pressures.

Nurturing nature by creating attractive green havens within busy urban communities brings multiple benefits. They make our towns and cities pleasanter places for people to spend their time in, they support plants and trees which help us on the path towards decarbonisation, and they can provide a much-needed haven for local wildlife.

Such parkland areas also serve as welcoming community areas where people can meet up, relax and take time out from the surrounding hustle and bustle. On a wider scale, such regreening makes our towns and cities more visually appealing, improves air quality and enhances occupants’ sense of wellbeing, while promoting a renewed pride in their neighbourhood.

At idverde, we are specialists at integrating green spaces into our grounds maintenance and landscape creation schemes, and our work was recently featured in Horticultural Week.

Our team is currently working on a large-scale regreening project designed to make better use of green spaces to transform key parts of London’s West End. Camden’s West End Project is the capital’s biggest council-led public realm and transport improvement scheme, focused on addressing a shortage of public open space, relieving traffic congestion and improving poor air quality.

The project involves creating landscaped green areas and enhancing travel links in the area around Tottenham Court Road, reinvigorating this part of London.

Award-winning results

The first scheme we undertook as part of the West End Project was Whitfield Gardens, the regeneration of a Victorian public garden built in 1894 but untouched since the 1980s. Having become a target for anti-social behaviour, we remodelled it to bring it back to its former glory. While taking care to retain existing mature trees, we rejuvenated the social square area with new paving, street seating and raised planting of shade-loving shrubs.

Undertaken during 2020’s lockdown, important aspects of this scheme were the need for sensitivity in engaging with local residents and flexibility in our project management to ensure people confined to their homes were not unduly disturbed by the inevitable excavation work involved.

Our second West End Project scheme was Alfred Place, which has transformed a congested city back-street into one of the capital’s first new public parks for over 25 years.

Again retaining existing trees, we introduced meandering pathways, lawns, a children’s play area and an array of plants to create richly biodiverse wildlife habitats.

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As first shown in Horticulture Week – October 2022