Wray Crescent park has won a Green Flag Award

Wray Crescent park has won a Green Flag Award

2020-10-15 Off By Editor

We’re really pleased to share that Wray Crescent park has won the Green Flag Award.

The award is an international standard that recognises parks and green spaces for:

  • Ensuring everyone has access to quality green and other spaces, wherever they live.
  • Working to make sure they are appropriately managed and meet the needs of the communities they serve.
  • For good management standards.
  • To promote and share good practice amongst the green space sector.
  • To recognise and reward the hard work of managers, staff and volunteers.

The Friends of Wray Crescent are so happy to have helped bring our little park some recognition for the valuable place it has become.

We know this space is a small green lung at the heart of our community, and we think everyone saw how important the park has become to us all during the pandemic, for many different reasons.

Working for our community

It has been just sixteen months since we opened the Yvonne Conolly Garden, a few months earlier we began work around the park.  So many people have told us how having this space on their doorstep is helping them make it through these challenging times.

The Green Flag award reflects the work, ideas and views of many, and we hope with your support to achieve more projects to make the park better for the entire park community. Park Ranger, Julian Evans said: “Many thanks for your sincere contribution in making this happen and congrats to all of you.”

We aren’t the only park to have won this status this year.

In Islington, Green Flags were also awarded to:

Green Flag Community Awards were received by the Arlington Association (Arlington Square), King Henry’s Walk Gardenand the Mary Tealby Peace Garden in Paradise Park. Congratulations to those groups also!

The History of Green Flag Awards

This year was a record year with over 2,000 parks reaching Green Flag status.

That’s a huge change. They’ve been giving out Green Flag Award since 1997. At that time many of the UK’s parks were deeply neglected and had become incredibly run down, to the detriment of the communities who relied so much on them.

Today, the Green Flag is recognised as an emblem for good parks, good park communities and good park management worldwide.

We hope it helps us continue the work we have been doing, and we wanted to share the news that Wray Park had achieved this fantastic milestone with everyone who is part of the park community.

Please join us

We still need so much help making the park better for everyone.

Social distancing makes it challenging to keep the Yvonne Conolly Garden maintained, despite which we have managed keep it going and to provide six hauls of fresh organic vegetables to the Crouch Hill food bank since Spring. You have been instrumental in telling us what you would like to see, in our recent park user survey (which we will discuss more in a few weeks).

Please join us and help make the park the real heart of where we are and where we want to be in these challenging times, and we’ll let you know when our next public meeting takes place, albeit on Zoom.