Your Park Bristol & Bath, a charity based in Bristol and Bath, is celebrating its fifth anniversary with the launch of a 12-month campaign to transform the two cities’ parks and green spaces. The charity believes that approximately one-third of the local population is unable to access or fully enjoy these public spaces due to various barriers.
According to Your Park Bristol & Bath, the majority of the 580 parks and green spaces in the two cities are not designed inclusively, which significantly impacts access for people with disabilities and their caregivers, women and girls, minority ethnic groups, and those living in low-income areas.
The charity has identified three key factors that prevent people from confidently and comfortably utilizing their local parks: physical accessibility, personal safety, and mental well-being. To address these issues, the Reimagining Parks campaign will launch on May 9th with the goal of making every park in Bristol and Bath accessible to all residents within a ten-minute walk from their home, workplace, or school. This means improving physical accessibility for people with disabilities, designing with the safety and enjoyment of women and girls in mind, and using parks to support those with mental health issues.
To kick off the 12-month campaign, Your Park Bristol & Bath is launching a six-week fundraising challenge, hoping to raise £30,000 to begin work in both cities. The charity also hopes to secure additional funding to achieve all of its targets. During this fundraising period, all donations will be matched by Aviva.
Charlee Bennett, the charity’s chief executive, explains, “Parks are nature-rich, free to use, community assets that are good for everyone’s mental and physical health, but they have historically been designed through a very narrow lens. That means there are literally hundreds of thousands of people in our two cities – and millions beyond – who feel unable to make the most of their local green spaces. The statistics are horrifying for people who don’t have sufficient access to nature.”
Bennett continues, “It’s actually not difficult to make parks more accessible – it involves simple measures like making information available better, creating wheelchair-friendly access, having accessible toilets, clear sight lines for safety, introducing inclusive activities such as sensory walks and wellbeing activities. Unfortunately, many of these measures are not possible within the shrinking budgets that local authorities, who are responsible for the basic maintenance of parks, have available to them.”
The Reimagining Parks campaign aims to make significant changes to promote inclusivity, safety, and well-being. Key targets for the year include creating two fully accessible parks, developing a program of accessible activities in every neighborhood, redesigning two parks with a focus on women’s safety, and expanding the Roots to Wellbeing GP-referral program.
The campaign will officially launch on May 9th at Hartcliffe Millennium Green, a park in Bristol known for having high rates of health deprivation, green space deprivation, and disabled residents. Your Park Bristol & Bath has been working with the community in Hartcliffe for the past two years, and a recent accessibility assessment conducted with local disabled individuals and caregivers has laid the groundwork for actionable plans to improve accessibility.
While the maintenance of parks in both cities is the responsibility of the two local authorities, Your Park Bristol & Bath provides support. The charity was established five years ago as only the second UK parks charity to come out of Nesta’s Rethinking Parks program. Despite the challenges of the pandemic, Your Park Bristol & Bath has made a significant impact, supporting over 3,000 people through its activities in 2023.
To learn more about the Reimagining Parks campaign or to donate to the £30k Crowdfunder, visit https://yourpark.org.uk/reimagining-parks.
Derick is an experienced reporter having held multiple senior roles for large publishers across Europe. Specialist subjects include small business and financial emerging markets.