Five years ago, the Notts suburb of The Meadows got a major funding boost to help the community live greener, richer lives and take local action on climate change. With that grant now ending, local resident Lottie Limb takes a look at what the Green Meadows project has achieved and how it can evolve.
It’s a sunny day in Victoria Primary School garden, and a dozen people are gathered around a pile of planks. Our task: find the right pieces to drill together and replace the old rot-softened raised beds. This is the first Meadows Action Day I’ve joined since moving to the area last year and, with an empty box of DIY skills, I worry I’m going to be a spare part. Even among a more practical group, it’s hard to see how we’re going to get this done in the allotted hour-and-a-half. But many hands make light work. Under the vivacious task-mastering of forest school teacher Jola Walker, we manage it with time to enjoy her homemade cherry cake and elderflower juice.
Wholesome community action days like these are a brainchild of Green Meadows: a programme to help Meadows residents live greener, more sustainable lives. Inspired by existing patches of grassroots activity, it was launched by Nottingham Energy Partnership (NEP) and community energy group MOZES in 2021, thanks to a £1.5 million National Lottery grant. NEP’s energy expertise is the bedrock of Green Meadows.
One of its first projects was to conduct an energy audit of the area’s housing stock, painting a detailed picture of potential upgrades for 61 house types. Retrofit guides, DIY training sessions and a toolshare followed. Green Meadows has flowered into many other community projects too, including primary school workshops, a composting group and repair cafe. But with the five-year funding period ending in July, the team at NEP are busily working out how to keep all these great initiatives going.
“The starting point was strong demand from people passionate about addressing climate change,” explains project manager Patrick Keen. “But the things that we do are really practical; it’s a whole load of things which help people lead healthier and happier lives.” The toolshare for example, a free lending service based in the Climate Hub on Turney Street, has saved residents an estimated £85,000 in total since January 2024, and avoided 7,800kg in carbon emissions. NEP also estimates that fully retrofitting Meadows houses as per its survey recommendations would save residents more than £5 million every year in energy bills, while cutting carbon by 7,950 tonnes a year – the equivalent of around 8,121 flights from London to New York.
The things that we do are really practical; it’s a whole load of things which help people lead healthier and happier lives
For Green Meadows’ most active members, the social value is significant too. “Helping with action days has enabled me to meet people in the local area,” Alex Wells tells me, after we return to the Climate Hub for cook-in-a-box dhal and a discussion about the future. “It means that when I'm walking down the street sometimes I see somebody I know, which wasn't the case at all beforehand.”
Student Marika Kerkham has particularly enjoyed getting involved with the festival – an annual event on the Recreation Ground which always brings in new faces. “I love the Meadows, I like the people here,” says Caroline Beaumont. “I just feel that the council hasn’t got enough time or money to make this place look attractive.” Other action days have focused on greenifying public spaces, including installing planters with built-in seating at the Bridgeway shopping precinct. “Not many people have got back gardens here,” Caroline points out, so the forest school and allotment sessions give them an opportunity to get green-fingered.
Around the time of the action day in April, I went to see Punch at the Playhouse – a soul-searching play about the life of a man who killed a stranger with a single punch in Nottingham fifteen years ago. The assailant is from the Meadows – represented by a single grey underpass that dominates the stage. There’s an environmental determinism to the way the character playing Jacob Dunne describes his estate: “With the flats and houses stacked on top of one another at these oddball angles, it forms these, well, hidden tunnels and escape routes to scuttle off down, in the dark. The ‘anti-social behavior’ that resulted… is an ongoing challenge.”
No doubt urban planners of the 1970s have a lot to answer for. But as people will tell you and council ward reports show, this feels like an outdated portrait now. Green Meadows has mapped the area in its own way, marking a butterfly walk, hedgehog highway, wildlife pond in the Memorial Gardens, and refill station in the Arkwright Meadows Community Gardens. Artists are set to paint the underpasses with local schoolchildren’s green visions. It would be a stretch to say all this is transformational, but it’s there if you look for it – bits of a new story the Meadows can tell about itself. An invitation to scratch beneath the surface and get your fingernails muddy.
“I suppose the things that you might not see which are perhaps more important are the improvements to the houses,” says Patrick. There have been over 600 attendances at retrofit workshops at the Climate Hub, including from inside a shed fitted out like a loft. NEP is also fully retrofitting a terrace house on Pyatt Street with a ‘fabric first’ approach to insulation and a heat pump, providing a live building site in which to train people. This energy education will continue and projects will adapt; the toolshare, for example, is turning into a paid membership model for wider Nottingham. Meanwhile, the team is supporting Green Meadows-born community groups to become self-sustaining.
New funding is needed to secure other branches of the Green Meadows tree however, such as its climate education workshops in schools. These have a strong practical element to them, explains Patrick, which demystifies a “scary intangible concept” and makes the global local. As Jola said to me (shortly after I drilled my first pilot hole) “to be proud of the area you live in, you have to own it.” She was talking about the community ethos of the school, why the children take part in litter picking for example, and enjoy park visits. But it’s true for every resident here, who Green Meadows has tried to involve in a virtuous green cycle. Long may it continue.
For more information and to get involved, check out the Green Meadows website.
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