Whalley Range alleyways are for everyone
In January 2024, In Our Nature started working with local residents to help them build skills, come together and help make their alleyway more climate resilient and an all-round nicer place to be!
Check out what we got up to…
How did this project come about?
Our alleyway heroes Paula and Jane had been tidying their alleyways and the surrounding streets for a few years now. Since seeing the changes this has made, they wanted to green up the alleyway so people respected the space more and to see if it could cut down on fly tipping. To find out what else residents thought about their alleyways and what would help, we held an open consultation session and spoke to 12 members of the community about what they wanted to change in the alleyway. The main areas people wanted were:
Skills based activities
Sharing knowledge
Visit some of the other greened alleyways nearby
Water saving planters
Connect interested residents
Lighting in the alleyway
So, how did we help make this happen?
We ran 6 workshops and events that would enable residents to pick up new skills in order to make the changes they wanted. We decided to focus on one publicly accessible alleyway in the area with the hope that interest would spread from there.
We ran 3 skill-based workshops to help residents keep improving the alleyway long term. The skills they picked up were:
How to build planters from purchased wood, and using old pallets
How to make a water saving planter
How to upcycle fly tipped items
What we learnt
Throughout the project advice from other members of the community and those already greening their alleyways was invaluable. We learnt that inspiration from others and sharing knowledge saves time and money!
To put this into practice we held a resourceful gardening Q&A at a nearby alleyway called the Reflective Passage. Eddy who has transformed this alleyway gave us a tour and together with Yaz (from Cloudy Alley),they gave us their top tips for long term alleyway gardening and how to get started.
Advice that came up time and time again was to try and make watering plants as easy as possible. As alleyway plants are always in pots or containers, they can dry out easily and watering by hand takes lots of time, can be tricky if you don’t have an accessible or long enough hose and uses mains water. To help combat this in our alleyway Sow the City led a workshop on how to create water saving planters that collect rainwater and store it for plants to access when they’re parched!
Still not sure what a water saving planter is? Check out this video on how to make your own!
As well as drought resistant planters we also added some other climate resilient tricks:
Biodiversity friendly plants (that would also survive in a shady alleyway!)
Solar powered string and security lighting
What was the impact?
We engaged 52 local residents overall
100% of people we surveyed said they were pleased with how the alleyway looks
100% of people we surveyed were inspired to continue looking after this alleyway or do a similar project somewhere else
To begin clearing the alleyway we cleared 20 bags of litter at the Great British Spring Clean
What did people think?
“The flying tipping has definitely improved because it looks like people care about the area now, and we obviously do, and people did, but because we weren’t particularly connected with each other before it just felt like it was never going to get any better but now it does feel like it can get better”
“The kind of non-visible thing about doing this has been this thing where people have been walking past when we’ve been doing stuff like just planting things or watering things and they say how much they appreciate it”
Want more wisdom from Paula and Jane?
