Discover the North East's New Green Corridors
One of the first of its kind in the country, a new project to create three green corridors to connect communities with nature in the North East has received £3 million in funding for the next three years
When you imagine the green spaces of the North East, inevitably the mind is drawn to rural areas – the rugged hills of Northumberland, County Durham’s breathtaking moorland and the Cleveland Hills which dominate the landscape to the south of the region. But often overlooked are the more urban areas of the North East, where small pockets of greenery still thrive but remain largely forgotten by the public. The new Green Corridors project (which includes the recently opened Tyne Derwent Way) aims to combat this by connecting urban communities with nature to improve biodiversity, wellbeing and raise awareness of local history and culture.
Delivered by the National Trust (with partners including Newcastle, Durham and Teesside Universities as part of an AHRC Mission project), the project is a new approach to green spaces, which takes the conversation beyond typical heritage sites and into urban areas. ‘Going back to the founding purpose of the National Trust, we were set up 130 years ago with the aim of ensuring people could enjoy places of nature, beauty and history,’ Helen explains. ‘That is our key founding purpose. When we bring that to the modern day, we know that 90 percent of people by 2030 are going to be living in urban areas.’
A staggering statistic, and the question is how to make sure that nature remains an essential part of the public’s life in an increasingly urbanised world. The answer, hopefully, is in new green corridors leading from urban areas out into the countryside. ‘The majority of us do live in urban settings. When we look at the facts of where we [need to] make access to natural spaces better, it’s urban areas where we know that there isn’t the access,’ Helen explains. ‘So it’s creating that connection between people and nature close to where they live – that was the idea behind [the] green corridors.’
Three areas were identified for this project, including the area between the Tyne and Derwent rivers, a section of County Durham along the River Wear, and a 10-mile stretch connecting the centre of Middlesbrough and the Tees Estuary to the North York Moors National Park. The Tyne Derwent Way is currently the most developed of the corridors and was opened last year, connecting attractions like Gateshead Riverside Park, Dunston Staiths, Nine Arches Viaduct and Gibside.
The next corridor in Durham will stretch along the River Wear from Durham city centre to nature-rich sites nearby, like Crook Hall Gardens, Finchale Priory and Mallygill Wood. ‘Basically it’s a green wedge from Durham city all the way out to Finchale Priory,’ says Helen. ‘They tend to be places that people don’t know about, they’ve forgotten about or are just not sign posted. Maybe they don’t feel that safe in those spaces because they’re not well lit, or they’ve just never been there.’ The Durham route will cover an impressive 1,000 hectares of green and blue spaces (outdoor environments featuring water), and when complete will link to existing trails in the area like Camino Inglés and the Weardale Way.
The Tees to Topping corridor from Middlesbrough envisions another bold transformation for a heavily urbanised area. ‘It takes you from the Tees Estuary along to Roseberry Topping and then to the North York Moors National Park. It’s about a 10-mile stretch and it’s from really urban Middlesbrough,’ explains Helen. Though it’s still early days for this particular part of the project, the corridor will link up sites like Ormesby Beck, Ormesby Hall, Stewart Park, Flatt Lanes Country Park and Guisborough Forest.
As well as bringing awareness to local habitats, the challenge for this project is helping the public to see urban areas in a new light – a task which requires a different approach to more typical conservation and restoration projects. ’In the trust we’re learning a lot and I think that’s why we know we have to do this partnership, because our background is very much our properties – you look at the coastline, or the countryside, and when you look in an urban place there are different questions and different barriers,’ says Helen. ‘When we did an early days survey of Gateshead for the Tyne Derwent Way, the first thing that came up for everyone was safety. It’s a different question isn’t it really? You don’t feel like that when you’re at Gibside or when you’re at Cragside. There’s more dark spaces, and there’s just that feeling of [being] unsafe.’
An urban success story to come out of the project so far has been the transformation of an area of Gateshead on Rose Street. ‘There’s a forest school now in Gateshead Riverside Park. It was basically a drugs den before – it had drug paraphernalia, it was fly-tipped and people wouldn’t go in there,’ says Helen. ‘Now it’s a forest school that the kids know about and the local kids come to. It has a fire pit where kids come and cook, it has a hammock where they go and sit in the trees, it has crafts that they can do and it engages the people in those houses on quite a transient street.’
One of the next things on the agenda for the project is to gather a foundational understanding of the landscape. ‘What we’re looking at next with this funding is to really get a baseline to understand what is there in these urban spaces – people are like ‘there’s nothing there’, just a few trees, but actually there’s not,’ she explains ‘They’re all reclaimed from past industries – nature takes over and finds a way, doesn’t it? But we don’t know how rich it is. We do know with the Tyne Derwent Way we’ve had to get rid of stuff because the wrong stuff is getting in there. It’s about really knowing what our native species are and what we need to do.’
Another key theme of the project is stewardship – not only creating these green corridors for the public, but instilling a sense of responsibility for their local landscape – and this is a central part of the trust’s new strategy of ‘people and nature thriving’. ‘It’s the idea of, how do we get people passionate about something that’s on their doorstep? Something they know about, but they suddenly realise, this is for us, this is our nature, this is our space, and it’s about all of us being involved. I think that’s how the trust is seeing this new strategy.’
It is a long-term project but in the following months plenty of activities and workshops will be announced to encourage the community to have their say in the development of the corridors. ‘It’s research but it’s research with the community,’ Helen says. ’It’s not just top-down, it’s how do we bring people along?’
For such a large project, success is a multi-faceted thing, from community engagement to wildlife recovery, but for Helen, success is also helping the corridors to outlast the project. ‘It’s not like three years and we’re out. We know that nature isn’t suddenly not going to be in crisis, heritage isn’t suddenly going to improve and we know that health and wellbeing is a massive issue,’ she says. ‘This is really the beginning and these spaces are going to last well beyond us. I see it as we’re the custodians at the beginning – we set it up so that the next people who come along, whoever it is in 20 years or 30 years, have something really good to base their work on.’
