Your Community Greenspace is a five-year, National Lottery Heritage Fund-supported project that has transformed how Peterborough’s communities connect with Ferry Meadows Country Park, which welcomes over one million visitors a year. Restoration of the 10-hectare Ham Mere wetland has boosted biodiversity and flood storage capacity, while annual park event attendance has grown by over 200% and children’s education visits have risen 220%, with 2,843 school children visiting in 2023 alone. The Pop-Up Park programme has taken the park directly into deprived communities across the city, engaging an extra 1,000 people who might never otherwise have visited. Apprentices recruited through the project, some starting on the NEETS programme with no qualifications, have gone on to permanent countryside management roles, while Nene Nursery, co-designed with disabled people and care home residents, is now being studied nationally as a case study in accessible design. Training in unconscious bias, British Sign Language and dementia awareness has helped staff and volunteers welcome communities new to the park, while a Young People’s Forum gives teenagers a direct voice in shaping its future. In 2026, Nene Park Trust received the King’s Award for Enterprise in Sustainable Development. It is recognition of a project built as much on community trust as on habitat restoration.
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Why this matters
Nene Park sits within a rapidly expanding city, under constant pressure from development, traffic, and the demands of a growing population. Your Community Greenspace has made an outstanding contribution by not just maintaining the greenspace of the Nene Park estate, but actively improving it and, crucially, building the community will to protect it for the long term.
The project has created new infrastructure for nature: a new accessible bridge opening up previously hard-to-reach areas of the park, a restored welcome area with biodiversity-rich planting, a community hub used by dozens of local groups, and a volunteer building extended to support a growing conservation workforce. New Dexter cattle will be introduced to graze Ham Mere using traditional methods, restoring the wetland through low-impact land management that mirrors historic practices.
Perhaps most significantly, the project has embedded a conservation ethic in a new generation. Young Rangers have learned coppicing, reed bed management, and green woodworking. Schools in Residence children have been given their own raised beds in Nene Nursery and returned to their schools to improve their own grounds. Apprentices recruited through YCG, some of whom started out on the NEETS programme with no qualifications, have gone on to permanent roles in countryside management. The contribution YCG has made to the countryside includes the people, skills, and relationships it has cultivated to sustain it.
Impact
The most telling measure of YCG’s impact is a shift in relationship between Peterborough’s communities and the countryside on their doorstep.
Before YCG, many of the city’s communities had little connection with Ferry Meadows, whether because of cultural distance, transport barriers, or simply never having been invited in. The project has changed that through sustained, respectful outreach. Community leaders and groups across Peterborough, from the Polish Music Centre to Sikh, Muslim, and LGBTQIA+ communities, have all been welcomed into the park and have shaped its programme. Nineteen community leaders now sit on the project’s community forum network.
For individuals the impact has often been quietly transformative. A care home resident visiting Nene Nursery said: ‘You can hear the birds. Can we come again?’ A young person with social anxiety who joined the Art Club said it ‘really helped.’ A NEETS participant who came to the park for work experience taster sessions said it led them ‘down a career path I never really even knew about.’ An older retired engineer, otherwise quiet at his day centre, became animated teaching others to use hand tools in the nursery, prompting staff to remark: ‘You’re not like this at the centre.’
These individual moments, replicated across thousands of participants, are the impact of YCG, namely people feeling that the countryside belongs to them, and that they belong in it.
Inclusion and accessibility
Nene Park Trust has approached inclusion in Your Community Greenspace not as a target to hit but as a keystone of project delivery.
Nene Nursery was co-designed with disabled people before a single bed was built, tested by care home residents arriving by minibus to check ramps, pathways, and facilities. The Activity Alliance is now documenting this process as a national case study in best-practice participatory design. Online Sensory Gardening sessions were developed with Sense charity, reaching people with complex needs in their own homes.
Staff and volunteers have undertaken extensive training to build confidence working with communities new to the park, including unconscious bias training, British Sign Language sessions, dementia awareness, and cultural confidence workshops. Events including Peterborough Celebrates have been interpreted in British Sign Language. The park has established itself as a formally recognised safe space for the LGBTQIA+ community, through the Identities programme developed with the local Pride Network.
A Young People’s Forum has given teenagers an active voice in shaping the park’s future plans. Work experience taster days have specifically targeted young people aged 14 to 16 from schools where families had difficulty navigating English-language booking processes, prompting the team to redesign how they communicate and recruit. Where barriers have been found, the project has responded: adjusting, listening, and trying again. That iterative commitment to genuine inclusion is what makes YCG’s approach worth recognising.
