This is Hick’s Lodge in Leicestershire, near Ashby-de-la-Zouch. It’s set in the National Forest and run as a cycle centre by Forestry England, providing a café, educational resources, a small cycle shop for repairs, sales and hire, encourages horse riding, and is a bit of a confluence of various local and regional footpaths. For the less adrenaline and over-excited children orientated amongst us, there are plenty of lovely, quiet walks around lakes and through the developing woodland.

It’s also a good example of reintroducing biodiversity to a redundant, depleted and aesthetically ruined landscape of an old coal mine, whilst providing an attractive and vibrant open space for public use and well-being. If you look at a local map, it’s in an area that’s rammed full of urban areas (mainly built up around old mining towns), road infrastructure, rail infrastructure, quarrying, industry, industrial heritage and canal systems; between all of this and productive agricultural land, there’s not a lot of space for the wild things – including toddlers letting off steam. 

Schemes involving landscape restoration and introducing biodiversity involve a broad team of experts: ecologists, landscape architects, engineers, architects, planners (to plan and design); land managers, rangers, ecologists, arboriculturalists, foresters, contractors (to implement, build, plant, maintain); and volunteers. Funding is a tricky one, there’s little or no profit to be an attractive business venture, so I’d say a huge amount of work goes into keeping enough money coming in to carry out all the necessary maintenance works and to be able to implement new phases.  

But these places are both really important for so many people, creatures and reasons, and really exciting projects to be involved with. Some pretty big aspirations bringing some hope and optimism for the future – lets have some more.