Our ambition is to make HGS the most biodiverse urban area in the UK

2024 saw the launch of “Britain’s Biggest Living Garden”, an ambitious project seeking to establish HGS as the most biodiverse area of urban Britain. “Britain’s Biggest Living Garden” will become a national flagship that showcases the impact communities can have on nurturing and supporting wildlife around them, and the collective impact of domestic gardens.

It is commonly thought that to impact biodiversity you either need a huge estate to “re-wild” or that you must accept an unruly garden that is neither usable or beautiful. These could not be further from the truth. 

In fact, domestic gardens are found to be an incredibly important hub of biodiversity. A seminal study by Dr Jennifer Owen recorded over 2,500 species in her modest Leicester garden, a density of species higher than in the African rainforest. In contrast to common beliefs around  “re-wilding”, the key to unlocking biodiversity in gardens is a wide range of well maintained and tended-to plants and habitats packed into a small area - an untended garden will, over time, become the domain of brambles, with limited benefit to wildlife. 

UK gardens make up an area that is larger than all UK wildlife reserves put together -equivalent to 1/5th the size of Wales. With ever increasing pressure from development, agriculture and pollution on the remaining countryside, gardens are becoming ever more important for our wildlife.

Gardens “link” together islands of habitat as green corridors, especially where there is a high density of interconnected gardens so wildlife can move freely between them.

Here HGS comes into its own. The founding principles of the suburb enshrined green space at the core of this urban environment, giving nearly every household access to a garden, surrounding houses with plentiful greens, parks and woodland and critically, connecting all those densely packed gardens together as one, through what may be the highest urban density of hedging in the UK.

Since launching the project in 2024 significant progress has been made

• Hugely successful launch of HGS Kids Gardening club, where over 100 children & volunteers have created and nurture two new wildlife friendly community gardens in the centre of HGS

• Two features of HGS on the BBC, and many other pieces of press coverage

• Conducted the first ever suburb wide biodiversity studies, covering four sites and identifying 100s of species

• Launched a citizen science wildlife recording project on iNaturalist, with over 1,000 observations made (find out more and join here)

• Established Friends of Lyttelton group to improve our largest local park for wildlife and park users alike, making significant developments to the wildlife friendly orchard area, and crowdfunding 22 pollinator friendly planters

• In discussions with a UK based university to conduct a research project on urban biodiversity based in HGS

• Grown our community of actively engaged and interested residents to over 250 people, with an active, exciting and wildlife focussed WhatsApp group (which you can join here)

• Hosted large number of community events, including in partnership with global charity, Earthwatch

Together we can achieve something truly amazing here; making the Suburb a beacon of hope for wildlife in our changing world, engaging and inspiring our children - showing them that their individual actions can make a difference, bringing together our community and in the process gaining national recognition.