On July 22nd, London became the world’s 1st National Park City. Your Friends co-chairs, Julia and Richard, were honoured to be at the launch and to sign the charter on behalf of FoWC. You can read more about what this means and sign the charter yourself here.

To mark the occasion we organised a number of events: a summer butterfly talk, following on from our spring talk and once again hosted by Simon Saville of Butterfly Conservation. We also launched our summer butterfly leaflet, all set for the Big Butterfly Count on the Common on August 3rd. We were also pleased to have Roy Vickery, a local wildflower expert, who helped us identify some of the 30 or so wildflowers to be found on the Common in the areas being managed specifically for that purpose. We’re designing a new leaflet based on some of the flowers we saw.

The climax of the celebrations was an inspirational talk by Daniel Raven-Ellison, the man whose idea National Park City was, attended by over 90 people from all over the borough, including councillors, council officials, Enable, borough wide Friends groups and other local organisations. Coming the week after Wandsworth announced its ambition of becoming the greenest of inner London boroughs, we’re very pleased to have introduced our local decision makers to Dan to learn from his experience and knowledge base.