Out of many opportunities, in our city, to get your hands dirty with soil while improving your local green space, annual community planting day Wild About Sneinton continues to stand out – bringing together volunteers and creatives to get local people properly in touch with their green souls. Joe Callow attended the 2025 edition, and learned about how the event is benefitting people
Nottingham’s green spaces are flourishing thanks to the dedication of local volunteers and community groups working to bring wildlife back into the heart of the city. At the Wild About Sneinton event I’m attending today, volunteers are planting, painting murals, and playing music to transform this corner of the city into a nature and creativity-rich area.
Organised by GrowNotts, the day celebrates collaboration, creativity, and the simple joy of getting your hands in the soil. From Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust’s youth group Keeping It Wild to the local residents getting involved, everyone has a role to play in making Sneinton greener, kinder, and more connected.
Approaching the cluster of friendly faces, I made my way up Sneinton Dale, warmly greeted by the soft hum of folk music and the scatter of gardening gloves. I’m immediately offered a fresh apple and invited to plant some bulbs. A real sense of community welcomes me in.
Kingston Court is being planted up for spring along with seven other green (and not-so-green) spaces transformed by locals. I catch up with Jack Harris, GN facilitator on the side of a road, about the importance of bringing people together to grow and build a sense of community. “We all need to feel like we can make a difference where we live,” he explains. “When people see it’s easy to get involved, it builds confidence that anyone can help out.”
As the music fades, the last bulbs are planted, and cold fingers warm up in the nearby King Billy pub, Sneinton is left feeling a little brighter and more colourful
Keeping it Wild is a youth-led volunteer group based in Nottingham and is currently the only fully youth-led team of the Wildlife Trust movement that completely manages its own nature reserve. Clouds loom over the city today, but there is a genial spirit in the air as Keeping it Wild help to build a dead hedge and add to the existing flower beds created during last year’s Wild About Sneinton. New growing and flowering spaces emerge as everyone muddies their knees alongside the other local volunteers, planting bulbs and wildflowers.
As I walk down the road I chat with Keeping it Wild team member Emily Tomlinson, planting wildflowers in new raised beds opposite derelict pub The Wheatsheaf: “I feel really uplifted, it's really positive to see everyone out and about and getting involved. Fostering a sense of community is really important, because if we’re all inside not getting involved it is easy to feel divided, but events like this help you feel unity.”
Nottingham has always had a strong sense of community, and whilst things may feel more fragmented than they used to, creating vibrant, wilder spaces for all to enjoy is crucial to the bringing people together. It is clear to see the positive effect the environment has on the city, but so too how it improves young volunteers’ mental health and helps them feel part of something.
Matt Sims joins us to plant bulbs, grasses, herbs, and wildflowers round the corner from the action by a doctor's surgery, after a friend suggested he came along. I ask him how it feels to be part of a community event: “It just feels great. It feels really quite old school with the folk band jamming around and everyone just dropping in and out doing gardening together.”
A gentle bowed violin and a soothing accordion warms everyone up against the nippy winds as Luddite Folk Sessions’ music spreads harmonious smiles on Sneinton’s busy road corner. Painters decorate Saint George's flag signs with ‘We are kind’ - a patriotic, yet welcoming rebuttal to the summer's parade of angry flags, creating a sense of added togetherness and welcoming in Sneinton.
William, Luddite Folk Sessions' accordion player, speaks cheerfully with me: “It’s a lovely event, I don't live in Sneinton but friends of mine do and I'm here often. Today just feels very kind and nice, we’ve got a lot of people, everybody’s happy with each other and appreciating what everyone else is doing, it’s lovely. Biodiversity is very nice to look at, and I think if people are going out of their way to make things look nicer in terms of the environment that's fantastic.”
Biodiversity in Nottingham seems to be on the increase, with new green spaces like the Green Heart and Sussex Street by Nottingham College, but it’s communities who are driving initiatives like Wild About Sneinton. The project started through Sneinton locals, co-creator Emma Constable explains to me:
“The council did some road widening in Sneinton and planted trees, which created these large tree pits. They were very rough, rocky ground and I saw an opportunity to sow wildflower seed, to beautify and improve the area. So, I mentioned this idea to Jack from Grow Notts and he was really keen to join me. We went out under our own steam, sowed seeds, saw these gardens develop and what we got was just loads of positive feedback.”
“We were inspired by guerrilla gardening in Sneinton, and seeing that it was really well received,” Jack adds. “The inner city has a distinct lack of green space and people's own homes tend to have less green space. Those areas tend to be lower quality quite often and so it is important that we are given as many opportunities as possible for people to use public spaces and make them more vibrant, accessible, and beautiful, so that people want to spend more time in those and they have more purpose.”
The first Wild About Sneinton event in April transformed parts of the community’s shared spaces to improve greenness and biodiversity, similar to today. Coming back in autumn with more plants and slightly grubbier hands, the sense of unity is still apparent within the smiles on everyone's faces.
As the music fades, the last bulbs are planted, and cold fingers warm up in the nearby King Billy pub, Sneinton is left feeling a little brighter and more colourful. Wild About Sneinton shows how a community can come together to make a space more welcoming, green, and alive.
Wild About Sneinton took place on Saturday 25 October.
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