It’s March, so many of us are probably considering a spring clean of our homes. Environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy, however, are thinking in bigger terms, and running a litter picking initiative The Great British Spring Clean – set to be the nation’s biggest mass action environmental campaign. Taking part here in Notts are the Nottingham Clean Champions, a City Council-supported volunteer program – we join them on a litter pick…
On a rainy February weekend, I join the Hyson Green and Forest Fields Nottingham Clean Champions. Despite the drizzle, seven adults and four children, armed with signature purple bags and pickers, are here to clear the area of litter. They carry out a monthly group pick up, varying their route each time, focusing on specific parks or streets outside schools. Many will also do picks by themselves, fitting them in at a lunch break or during a dog walk.
Across the UK, over 400,000 volunteers will take part this month in a national movement to take action to tackle litter – The Great British Spring Clean, run by charity Keep Britain Tidy. In Nottingham, our network of over 700 Clean Champion volunteers will clean their streets and parks, picking up rubbish and reporting fly-tipping and graffiti. We freshen the rooms we live in; the Clean Champions freshen the streets we share.
The Clean Champions are a grassroots organisation set up by people who simply wanted to take action in their area. They’re supported by two incredibly dedicated and friendly coordinators at the City Council who make sure they have all the equipment, training, and that there’s someone at the other end to collect the bags.
The benefits of doing it together are clear, when I join them – there’s a real camaraderie in showing what they’ve collected, and the group makes short work of each park. Each filled bag is celebrated and there’s a real pride that they’ve collected a total of fifteen bags, but even more in walking back to the New Art Exchange café, via clean streets.
It feels like a secret society of collectors, each with their own goals and reasons, but all uniting to make the city cleaner
The group gets excited when we see another purple bag tucked behind a bin – a sign that we’re not alone. It feels like a secret society of collectors, each with their own goals and reasons, but all uniting to make the city cleaner.
As with those vacuuming their lounges for a spring clean, there’s pride in seeing a room, or street, return to itself. The freshness a room regains after a clean is the same quiet transformation a street undergoes when the litter is gone. Some volunteers want their children or grandchildren to enjoy a safe, pleasant walk in their neighbourhood, or simply enjoy the satisfaction of making a measurable difference, when so much of what we do is lost in meetings and processes. Cleanliness can be a way of practicing faith, whether within their house, street or city.
I ask Gianluca, the group leader, why he picks up litter, and he gestures to the children chatting and swapping toys as they collect it. He’s a lecturer at NTU and eloquently speaks about how we live in an atomised, fractured society. He wants to embed a different ethos of bringing community to life, through taking action together, and teach that to his children.
One of the children volunteering says the saddest thing they picked up was food, recognising that it’s “wasting food and is littering so that’s doubly bad.” The strangest thing collected? A keyboard, with the keys everywhere.
Hannah is on her first litter pick. She once cleaned beaches in Miami, and is now settled in Nottingham, hoping to build the same habits here. She’s grateful to the team for putting the infrastructure in place so she can simply join in: “They’ve created it from scratch, which is brave to take a step before you know where you will land”. Another volunteer had complained about the amount of litter with a friend, who good-naturedly challenged him to do something about it.
But how do they stay motivated, when, just as with chores inside the house, the moment it’s done more crumbs are dropped. “We’re trying to keep everyone’s hope up, to realise they don’t have to accept this, we can do something,” says Zaynab, who with her sister Farzana, set up the Hyson Green Community Action.
This stubborn hope is exactly what the Spring Clean celebrates — that small, repeated acts can refresh a whole area. Together, they celebrate sharing the message of hope when they see others join in, when neighbours sweep out the pavements, or join them on a pickup. Rather than blaming each other for the waste, it’s about working together to improve the area we all live and work in. As we walk, some shop owners offer free coffee and cakes to say thank you.
It’s a simple, accessible way to volunteer and make a visible difference to your area. The Spring Clean only happens once a year but in between there’s plenty of quick tidies and filled bags. For many, this simple act may be a gateway to wider community involvement. One volunteer wryly noted that “quite a few of us do lots of bits and bobs”.
The moment you start tidying your patch, you notice the whole network tidying theirs. Zaynab and Farzana hadn’t set out to start a community interest company, but knowing they needed to do more, they used their skills and advice from Nottingham Enterprise to turn frustration into something practical.
Other volunteers work with local projects – Nottz Gardens, Green Guardians or Community Gardens to focus their efforts. Expanding this network, there’s a Clean Champion partnership with the Nottingham Wildlife Trust Youth Group who look after their wildlife areas, or GoodGym, who include a run with their litter pick up (described by the unusual verb of ‘plogging’).
The Great British Spring Clean highlights what these year-round efforts achieve: thousands of bags collected, neighbourhoods transformed, and a city that enters spring visibly renewed. Twenty wards in twenty days is the city’s version of ‘every room in the house’, making every part of Nottingham fresh for the year ahead. In 2025, the Clean Champions reported collecting 7,020 purple bags of litter. In January 2026, they beat all previous records and collected 965 bags of litter.
These purple bags and clean streets are an example of the incredible power the volunteers have, and the visible impact they can collectively make through small individual efforts. Hope is a verb (with its sleeves rolled up!).
If you’d like to join the Clean Champions, you can contact the team at clean.champions@nottinghamcity.gov.uk
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