Friends of Wormholt Park Annual Report 2018-19by Chair, Vanessa Hampton

The Friends of Wormholt Park have had a busy year and as ever, we have had the support of our committee, local organisations: Hammersmith Community Gardens Association (HCGA) and Wormholt Residents Association (WRA) and the Council, LBHF.

The committee have put in the hours, not just running events in the park, but also consulting with the community and writing bids to gain funding for park improvements. While we were not successful in getting funding for additional swings in the playground, we did get a fantastic £5,000 towards ‘greening’ the park from the Mayor of London’s Greener City Fund Community Grant Scheme, improving biodiversity and making the park an even more attractive place for people and wildlife.

This funding will provide:

A new colourful and nectar-rich wildflower meadow New plants, trees and shrubs including sensory planting Increasing variety of habitats: new bird and bat boxes, bird bath and dead wood loggeries Increasing access to wildlife with signage and wildlife discovery events and equipment

We will be continuing to implement these improvements throughout 2019. Look out for events such as the evening bat walk, summer celebration event, bug hunts, bird walks and the big autumn planting event and picnic. We’ll also be strongly supporting WRA who want to take up the cause to campaign and fundraise for more swings for the park.

To keep this Friends of group going, we need your support – that’s not just financial but active participation too. We don’t want to stagnate as a Friends group with the same people doing all the work and both our committee and Friends membership needs to evolve and grow, reflecting the local neighbourhood, its needs and concerns.

You can support us by:

Coming to events we put on! Helping at our events – you could lead a nature walk, take up a spade or man a stall Spreading the word about our events – events shared on park posters and noticeboard, on

Wormholt Park’s Facebook & Twitter, my own Facebook & local group pages, Friends and WRA email list and on Next Door

Become a committee member or helper – this doesn’t have to be time-consuming, but will help us become a more diverse and efficient group

Get your friends and neighbours to become Friends Offer your skills to help the Friends such as:

o fundraising o social media and marketingo photography o horticulture and wildlifeo crafting/cooking/children’s gameso corporate volunteering o contacts with schools, local organisations or businesses that could support usEverything helps, so please contact me if you want to get involved in any way big or small.

Here’s a summary of our events this year:

We held a spring bulb planting event on 3 November 2018 attended by more than 40 people of all ages. The flowers looked wonderful when they came up in spring!

We held a Winter Bird Walk on Saturday 1 December 2018 and did more bird watching on Sunday 27 January 2019, joining in with the RSPB’s Winter Birdwatch.

We spotted the birds around the park and finished by making bird feed balls to hang in the trees or to take home. At the Birdwatch in January, 19 children and 20 adults came to record 13 species, including Greater Spotted Woodpecker, Goldfinch, Bluetits, Greattits, Robins, Woodpigeons and Starlings. We hope our habitat improvements mean that even more species visit our park in the future.

As part of our habitat improvements we also built a living willow tunnel in March in the toddler playground with the help of more than 70 children from St John’s Catholic Primary and Wormholt Primary Schools. This was supposed to be a play feature using cut (coppiced) willow stems that would continue to grow into a leafy tunnel.

Unfortunately, good ideas don’t always work out and the tunnel was torn apart on multiple occasions despite signage explaining what it was and asking that the stems be left in place. It has now disappeared entirely and while it’s sad that our efforts didn’t pan out, the children still had lots of fun and learnt about trees as the lungs of the earth, coppicing and willow weaving during the building. It’s a lesson that anything put into the play areas needs to be really robust and we may consider doing it in another area of the park next year.

Loggery building with Good Gym

On a Tuesday evening in April, we partnered up with Good Gym to build a loggery in the park. 13 runners from Good Gym ran 5.6 k to the park to build the loggery. Logs are partially buried in the

ground and decay naturally over time. These are a great habitat for invertebrates, including the protected Stagbeetles, which can be found nearby. The loggery will be planted up with ferns and Hellebores in autumn.

We continue to communicate with the council and Safer Neighbourhood Teams over your concerns, for example anti-social behaviour or maintenance issues like excessive pruning.

We are committed to maintaining and improving the standards of the park and retaining the Green Flag award status.

We have entered the London in Bloom It’s Your Neighbourhood Award run by the RHS for the first time this year. This will judge the input of the Friends and give us goals to work towards.

We hope to see you at our events in 2019. We’ll update you and you can contact us via email, park posters and..

o Email wormholtpark@gmail.com o The Friends’ website friendsofwormholtpark.org.uko Facebook: Wormholt Park https://www.facebook.com/wormholtpark1/ o Twitter: @wormholtparko Chair, Vanessa Hampton https://www.facebook.com/vanessa.hampton.315