A government-backed research and development project aimed at showing how local authorities can create a pipeline of high-quality pocket park schemes ready for the private sector to invest in is now looking for propcos, developers and construction firms to take part in its final stage.
The project, being run through Islington Council, already has the backing of local BID Central District Alliance and is in talks with a regional-based public-private investment partnership. It is now reaching out to property and construction firms as well as impact investors to help test and inform its “product” and potentially put capital into its initial pipeline of 300 projects and the infrastructure for their long-term maintenance.
Urban greening champion Charlotte Glazier, who is leading the project as Islington Council’s programme manager for greening the public realm, said a key objective was to offer a product which meets the ESG objectives of potential investors, with the longer-term goal to create an impact investment opportunity.
Glazier said: “If it can work in Islington, it can be replicated and scaled up regionally and across the whole of the UK. Early engagement is very welcome”.
Converting stub roads to pocket parks could bring multiple benefits, she said, including increasing natural places and planting for wildlife, providing canopy and shading, growing food, reducing local green deficit, reducing flood risk and heat island effect, creating new low-pollution green linkages and corridors and bringing multiple social and wellbeing benefits.
She added: “The onus is on the local authority to demonstrate how the product fits with ESG reporting tools. We’re trying to hone all of this to the UN Sustainable Development Goals so the thread of our thinking is clear for any investor.”
The project was one of 50 to secure a £100,000 grant from the Natural Environment Investment Readiness Fund in 2022, aimed at developing nature projects to a point where they can attract private investment. Only three urban greening proposals were awarded funding.
Since then, Glazier, working with Ludo Pittie, project director at consultancy WSP, has led the creation of a new design method tool, which will now be applied to around 300 potential pocket park sites in Islington alone. The principles are able to be applied to any scale of urban greening, including at neighbourhood level.
She is now keen to talk to private sector investors to find out what they would see as the “blockages and obstacles” to contributing funding and how these could be overcome.
“We know that internal finance, section 106, and various grants are not enough to scale up at pace, so we need to look at private finance,” she said. Glazier is hoping the property and construction sector’s inherent interest and awareness of the issues affecting the built environment will make it receptive to the project and is already in talks with several companies.
Costs to deliver a pocket park could range from around £40,000 to £200,000-plus depending on the scale and complexity. Annual maintenance could then be around £7,000, but this could be significantly reduced at scale and by community-led maintenance programmes already in development.
One of the most obvious barriers to delivering urban greening on the highways in the past has been the issue of maintenance and Glazier’s work includes exploring neighbourhood-wide maintenance and stewardship models to address this. This is currently being explored through the Islington Greener Together programme, a community-led proposal and maintenance programme, with Groundwork UK as a partner supporting individual community-maintained IGT projects, but the idea is to take this even further to a neighbourhood-scale model. She believes community hubs will be a crucial element to maintaining pockets parks, but also sees the need for a mobile resource to step in wherever there is a gap.
“This is all about climate adaptation. We can’t stop climate change, so we need to make our cities healthy, habitable places. This is applicable to the whole of the UK,” she said.
The pilot will report on its findings from the project in March.
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