Case study 3:

The Green Estate; environmental regeneration
Sheffield Wildlife Trust

The Manor & Castle area of Sheffield is a large predominantly 1930s-built housing estate, described as "the worst estate in England" in 1996. Two years later the Sheffield Wildlife Trust (SWT) established the Green Estate Programme in close partnership with Manor & Castle Development Trust. Since then the Programme has been working successfully to deliver an integrated environmental regeneration programme on the estate, linking skills training, local employment, community participation, greenspace creation and restoration, social enterprise and sustainable environmental management to turn what was a management liability into a productive asset.
Sheffield Wildlife Trust was set up in 1985, and is now a prominent member of several local regeneration partnerships in disadvantaged neighbourhoods across the north and east of the city. Its environmental regeneration work is based on a few key principles, which the Trust looks to achieve in everything that it does:

• wise use of natural resources;
• sustainable design, management and use of urban greenspaces;
• community participation in greenspace management;
• economic returns from environmental activity;
• enhancing people's quality of life

The Manor & Castle Green Estate

The most developed of the SWT regeneration programmes is the Green Estate, which is built around an integrated area environment plan, developed following an extensive series of audits, consultations and pilot projects. Central to its success is widespread community and agency support, a good understanding of the local social, political, economic and environmental context, and a commitment to innovative solutions that will generate sustainable income streams to underpin the future operation of the Estate.

Some central features of the programme are as follows:

Training Programme

The enhancement of the Green Estate's open spaces is creating considerable opportunities for employment in environmental management, landscaping and horticulture, for which local people are not necessarily appropriately qualified. The Green Estate Programme is working to train a future workforce to meet its needs and those of other environmental and horticultural organisations in Sheffield. The Trust's training programme currently offers NVQs in Environmental Conservation and Amenity Horticulture. Of 40 participants in the 2002 programme, 75% went on to gainful employment.

Pocket Parks

A number of small greenspaces have been created and/or enhanced around the estate, including local play parks, areas for quiet contemplation, community gardens, etc. These serve many purposes (such as providing a focus for communal events and activities, social interaction with other members of the local community, outside play and exercise, gardening, informal and formal horticultural and gardening skills training, etc), as well as improving local environmental quality.

Food and Health

The programme also involves the restoration of derelict allotments, and enabling local people to re-engage with them as a form of healthy outdoor active recreation. This has led SWT to setting up school farms; running educational activities about the links between food, farming, health and environment; and establishing food distribution networks to address food poverty and issues around poor local access to fresh fruit and vegetables. The Trust now operates a fruit and vegetable distribution network, 'cook and eat' training sessions, school tuck shops, a healthy eating community cafe and a series of professional food and nutrition training courses aimed at public health and community development professionals. SWT's activities around food have led it to establish a commercial urban dairy, linked to the Manor Lodge development, producing and selling 'Sheffield Brie', as a social enterprise (providing local employment, food hygiene training, etc).

Pictorial Meadows

A local income-generating social enterprise to develop innovative seed mixes and skills to plant and maintain them. This has been used to develop and demonstrate an innovative approach to landscaping (developed with the University of Sheffield) based around the greenspace at Fairleigh Gateway. This combines a variety of wildflowers to create flowerbeds with impressive floral displays, high resilience to trampling, and a long flowering season, while also bringing benefits to wildlife and low maintenance requirements.

Manor Lodge Scheduled Ancient Monument

The Green Estate is looking to turn this complex into a functional City Farm: a tourist attraction, visitor centre, heritage training centre, and a base for a range of local social and commercial enterprises linked into the enhancement, regeneration and management of Manor & Castle's greenspaces.

Deep Pits District Park

A large area of semi-derelict greenspace that in the past has been mined and built on, but is now being regenerated as a park, to complement the training, visitor and income-generating activities grouped around Sheffield Manor Lodge. Onward management of the Park will be part-funded through a contribution from the residents in a new adjacent housing estate (through collection of annual ground rents), and payment of water disposal charges to the Green Estate for the maintenance of wetland features within the Park (as they will be serving a drainage function for the estate).

Productive land use

A considerable area of brownfield land, ear-marked for future house-building, is now being managed as a temporary crop-area. Crops range from fields of wheat and barley to meadows of native cornfield wildflowers, and plantations of sunflowers. They are a low-cost way of improving the visual amenity of previously derelict sites, their creation and harvesting provides opportunities for landscaping skills training, the crops are saleable, and all the income from both landscaping contracts and crop sales goes back into the management of the Green Estate's greenspaces. Green waste is now disposed through a network of community composting sites, run semicommercially with each site contracting to dispose of waste for a different client. Other productive land uses include the establishment of a tree nursery on previously abandoned allotments, and growing herbs and plants in people's back gardens (as part of a 'Growing from Home' scheme).

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Nigel Doar
Director, Sheffield Wildlife Trust
see: www.wildsheffield.com


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