Community Rewilding Allestree Park

The Allestree Park project is an exciting urban rewilding project in Derbyshire. The project aims to engage with the local community to co-design and deliver a community rewilding project to create the largest urban rewilding site in England. 

Allestree Park is the largest open space in Derby, a city with a population of 250,000 people. The site is a former municipal golf course and also includes a local nature reserve and mixed woodland. Derby City Council is working with Derbyshire Wildlife Trust, the University of Derby and Friends of Allestree Park to develop the community rewilding project. 

Allestree Park is helping connect existing habitats around Derby and helping the city meet its climate commitments whilst also providing everyday access to quality nature experiences to local residents. Engagement with local communities include community co-design, volunteering, a new community orchard, a wellbeing hub, accessible and inclusive self-led recreational opportunities and programme of engagement opportunities (Wild Schools, Junior Rangers, Nature Tots, events and activities).

The project has three main aims:
 

1. Allestree Park is abundant with good quality wildlife and responding to the nature and climate emergency; nature is leading nature’s recovery, natural processes such as hydrology, natural regeneration, and nutrient cycling, have been kick started to ensure they are present and sustained, and more carbon is being stored.

2. People are at the heart of caring for Allestree Park; people are benefiting from an increased connection to nature through having good quality nature experiences on their doorstep and are more likely to support and deliver positive environmental actions.

3. Allestree Park Community Rewilding is an exemplar urban community rewilding project, influencing policy and practice in urban green spaces across Derbyshire and beyond.

KICK STARTING REWILDING

The project is taking shape with exciting progress in 2024 and ambitious plans for the future. At its heart is a natural processes approach, restoring key ecosystem functions to support wildlife and people in the park and the wider landscape. Plans include focusing on the hydrology and building leaky dams to ​‘slow the flow’ or seeing if nutrient cycling could be improved with a species reintroduction programme of the mini-but-mighty minotaur dung beetle. 

The key to ensuring these changes are successful is community engagement. There are a host of events planned for 2025 and beyond with many focusing on how residents can replicate the behaviours of some of nature’s ecosystem engineers through hands-on activities such as ​‘be a beaver’ and ​‘be a jay’ days. The project recently celebrated the success of a ​‘Tree for a tee’ initiative where 18 community groups adopted and planted fruiting trees on the site of the former golf club tee boxes. These trees not only foster a sense of community ownership within the project but also provide vital resources for birds, mammals and pollinators. Building on this success, future events will aim to embody the project’s vision: people and wildlife thriving together.