Local charity launches campaign to make Bristol park more accessible

A local charity has celebrated its fifth anniversary today by launching a 12-month campaign to make Hartcliffe Millennium Green more accessible.

Your Park Bristol & Bath (YPBB) was founded in February 2019 as part of the national Rethink Parks programme to reimagine how local communities can benefit from and support their parks and green spaces, and creates opportunities for the local communities to improve health, wellbeing and social cohesion with the people most in need.

After Friends of Earth identified that Hartcliffe is a hotspot for Green Space Deprivation and relatively high proportions of Disabled residents, YPBB chose Hartcliffe Millennium Green to become an exemplar park to demonstrate the simple changes that can be made to parks to support people that struggle to access them.

The small park is open 24/7 and has a play area - with a slingshot, dish roundabout, trampoline, accessible nest swing, climbing frame with slide and cargo net, boulders, logs, seats and bins-, a community garden and orchard, a performance arena, wildlife pond and wetland.

YPBB worked with the Friends of Hartcliffe Millennium Green and a group of local disabled people with a mix of impairments and differences, including neurodiversity, mobility and sensory impairments, to carry out what the charity believes is the world’s first community-led accessibility audit of a park involving all impairments. The learnings will be used to make the park more accessible.

With funding from the Postcode Local secured by Your Park and the Hartcliffe Millennium Green Friends of Group, the charity will be creating an accessible gate, new accessible paths and resurfacing, new notice boards to ease access information about the park, adding texture to paths for visually impaired people to tell the difference between centre/edges of parks and a pilot accessible bench and handrail.

Online information will also be made more accessible and the park’s entranceway will be made more inviting and attractive with planting and tidying up.

YPBB hopes to raise additional funds to make the bus stop accessible with a raised kerb, add texture to more pathways to support visually impaired people, create a tapping rail for long cane users, provide better play for disable children and younger children and more community activities to make the park feel better used and safer.

The charity is kicking off the 12-month initiative with a two-month £30k fundraising challenge to get initial work underway in both Hartcliffe Millennium Green and Bath’s Bricksfield Park. All money raised will also be doubled by Aviva.

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During the launch, YPBB tapped off key park areas and users were shut out to show how inaccessible the park is for certain groups.

Charlee Bennett, Chief Executive of YPBB, said: “Parks are nature-rich, free to use, community assets that are good for everyone’s mental and physical health, but they have historically been designed through a very narrow lens. That means there are literally hundreds of thousands of people in our two cities – and millions beyond – who feel unable to make the most of their local green spaces.

“The statistics are horrifying for people who don’t have sufficient access to nature – for example, people growing up with little green space around them are 55% more likely to develop psychiatric disorders in later life, at greater risk of things like depression, anxiety, and obesity, to name just a few things.

“It’s actually not difficult to make parks more accessible – it involves simple measures like making information available better, creating wheelchair-friendly access, having accessible toilets, clear sight lines for safety, introducing inclusive activities such as sensory walks and wellbeing activities. Unfortunately, many of these measures are not possible within the shrinking budgets that local authorities, who are responsible for the basic maintenance of parks, have available to them.

“Our Reimagining Parks campaign is not just changing landscapes, it’s fostering inclusivity, safety and wellbeing. This is a huge campaign for a small charity like ours to take on, but through our work with local communities over the last five years, we are absolutely clear on what needs to be done and we are determined to start delivering the changes now.”

For more information about the Reimagining Parks campaign or to donate to the £30k Crowdfunder, please go to https://yourpark.org.uk/reimagining-parks.