Wild Glades
Introduction
The Wild Glades project turned a major shopping centre, The Glades in Bromley, attracting over 20 million visitors a year, into a place where wildlife flourishes on the outside, and ecological engagement and learning is celebrated on the inside, becoming a beacon for sustainability in action!
The project’s success led to asset managers LaSalle building direct action for biodiversity into their UK and EU sustainability strategy, with wildlife becoming the fourth dimension in their ‘4 Pillars’ of sustainability and ESG: net zero carbon, reduce/reuse/recycle, social value and rewilding.
Background
In 2017, Arc approached real estate investment company LaSalle (JLL) to urge them to act to address biodiversity loss across their property assets, helping them to recognise the importance of ecological health to human wellbeing and to a truly sustainable future. Wild Glades was our first collaboration and testbed.
The project focussed on social engagement and ecological enhancement as ways to optimise the built asset and its grounds, boosting local biodiversity AND enriching the visitor experience at The Glades. It added interest, education, and opportunities to collaborate on local environmental action, for shoppers, tenant businesses and the neighbouring community, in turn delivering increased footfall for the store, wider impact in its locality, and greater contact between the management teams and the life of the city around them (including schools).
Wild Glades Recipe
The four parts of the Wild Glades project were:
1. an extensive audit of rewilding opportunities from top floor car parks to ground floor plazas;
2. week-long free pop-up natural history museum built into a vacant unit within the shopping centre, attracting thousands of visitors including local schools, conservation organisations and community volunteers;
3. first rewilding project, a 200m² green roof, revitalised with new planting and features for birds, bats and insects;
4. Wild Glades online biodiversity festival run during the March 2021 lockdown with content from national and local contributors reaching over 80,000 viewers and 71 schools and including film of the green roof project itself.
Designing for Nature
The focus of biodiversity gains for Wild Glades was an existing green roof alongside a main entrance to the shopping centre. This had been largely forgotten after its creation as a planning requirement. It was species-poor, with only 10 main species of grass and forb. Vacuum sampling indicated an impoverished fauna, with no pollinating insects present, no molluscs or other ground-dwelling invertebrates and small numbers of aphids and Braconid wasps. The nearest formal beds and planters, at ground level below the roof, were dominated by evergreen shrub varieties with little or no flowering herbaceous planting and therefore minimal supplementary foraging value for wildlife.
The roof rewilding delivered new wildlife resources, boosting pollen and nectar, fruit and seeds, adding 50 new foodplant species, nest boxes for house sparrows and house martins, bug boxes and timber ‘biototems’ for solitary bees and wasps and their associated communities; micropools to catch rainwater and sandpiles for warm, bare-ground habitats.
Community Engagement
Wild Glades engaged with staff, customers, businesses and the wider Bromley community. The roof garden continues to increase possibilities for wildlife encounter for visitors. The work involved The Glades management, security staff and maintenance teams at every stage, helping to make it happen and keeping the project part of the store conversation. The pop-up museum, and the online Wild Glades Festival both took the messages embodied by the roof project and developed them into a natural science masterclass for all ages and this has led to a growing partnership between the shopping centre and local organisations, in particular the ‘Greener Cleaner Bromley’ group. Greener Cleaner have gone on to charity status, running their Sustainability Hub from the centre.
The project has been keenly followed by Bromley Council and became a case study in the new borough sustainability strategy, helping us to make Wild Glades a transferable approach.
Outcomes
Wild Glades followed our original rewilding and social impact audit commissioned by LaSalle. Direct action for wildlife and sharing this ambition with a network of stakeholders was the foundation of the project. Enriching the ecosystem of the shopping centre’s urban habitats and enriching the ecosystem of local organizations, companies and communities that surround and permeate the centre, became LaSalle’s twin strategic objectives. Soon after the project completion, there was a measurable change in both.
A survey of the green roof just months after improvements found nesting solitary bees and wasps, ground bugs (heteropteran) and visiting dragonfly and butterfly species together with the rapid germination of new flower-rich sward. Surveys in the future will add further data and this will be repeated annually. Similarly, there became a new vitality to the way in which The Glades communicated with tenant businesses and its customers, driven by new content and a focus on engagement, sharing stories, successes and ambitions on the shared themes of sustainability, rewilding and positive change. The key lesson from the project is the critical importance of a determined local management team keeping up persistent positive pressure. The connection between strategic goals and real change on the ground can be weak; The Wild Glades has shown how it can be strong.
In 2021, The Wild Glades won the national top spot at the construction industry’s CIRIA Big Biodiversity Award, as well as an award for Community Engagement with Nature; a great way to celebrate what has been achieved so far, to encourage better practice for biodiversity in future, and to thank everyone who has contributed to this fantastic project.
Project Team
Arc Biodiversity & Climate, Artecology, LaSalle Investment Management, The Glades Shopping Centre, Bewonder*