March: Out with the old and in with the new

The new Tidy Towns funded Project Officer for Cardiff has been appointed. His name is Richard Weaver and he can be contacted on the same telephone number 07717412270 and by richard.weaver@keepwalestidy.org . Richard has a strong background in conservation and working with volunteers, formerly with Birmingham City Council as a Ranger. He has been volunteering with several groups in Cardiff for a number of groups including Cardiff Rivers Group, Friends of Bute Park and Riverside Greenwood Working Group. He will no doubt be contacting several of you and carrying on the work in Cardiff. There will be a handover period so please be a little patient with him as we make this transition as smooth as possible.

We'll be loading up new blogs onto the new KWT website from now on, so I'll put a link on this blog as soon as I have it.

This month, I, Chris, have started my new post as SE Wales Regional Manager, helping the 7 regions in our cluster. While learning the ropes on this role, I have also been fulfilling some of the events pre-booked before the new post was awarded. One of these was another Routes to School project with the last feeder Primary School in the cluster to Corpus Christi High School, St. Josephs. This school is in a built up area, but have a great little green space with some extremely mature trees. I had a few bat box kits left over from the tremendously successful Wild Weekend Project. So we did the popular build and camouflage painting session. It went down extremely well with both children and staff loving it. When I returned to drop off the Routes to School Litter Picking kit, the class had almost finished transforming the back wall of the classroom into a massive tree with a huge bat box with bat facts. I was amazed and it really shows how we can inspire people so easily at a young age. The school have also agreed to put the nearby park on their list of places to regularly pick and will report the data back to us just like the various groups and litter champions across Cardiff do.

Cardiff Friday Mornings environmental Project (CFMEP) almost finished off our long stretch of dead hedging on the edge of Grangemoor Park and had loads of positive comments from passersby. Some of the volunteers were going to be performing a similar activity at a local football club after learning the skills with us.

We then returned to St. Mellons to carry on working on a little section that Cardiff Parks Services had given us permission to cut back and pick near Cath Cobb Woods and Tesco. There was not a huge amount along the path we had previously picked. However, we went back to a stream by the side of Tesco. We pulled out 5 trolleys from within 4 metres of the bridge at the back of Tesco and loads of litter. There’s still some left, but the 10 vols bolstered by 20 students and staff from Cardiff and Vale College collected 21 bags of litter. This was all kindly collected by Parks Waste Services.

I have had a great time in Cardiff over the last few years and I hope you all find Richard as nice and impressive as I’ve come to see already and onwards and upwards for us all.