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Box 1
The Colne Valley Park at a glance
● 43 square miles
(10,000 hectares) of Green
Belt.
● Over 60 lakes, several
reservoirs, eight rivers, and the
Grand Union Canal.
● Six distinctive Country Parks,
and 20 other significant visitor
attractions.
● 13 designated Sites of Special
Scientific Interest.
● Seven Local Nature Reserves.
● Over 200 kilometres of rivers
and canals.
● Over 270 kilometres of public
rights of way.
‘An understanding of
the more holistic
benefits of green
infrastructure opens
up possibilities of
new forms of
investment in the
landscape’
regional significance in the Green Belt. Although
parts of the Colne Valley consisted of attractive
farmed landscape and historic private estates, it
was also scarred by derelict or under-utilised land
and uses typical of the urban fringe, and was
especially dominated by the consequences of
extensive gravel extraction.
The Park was conceived as an antidote to this,
with new recreational facilities thought primarily to
be for the benefit of Londoners – no less than
3 million people live within ten miles of the Colne
Valley. But although of a comparable ambition and
size to the Lee Valley Park in the north east
quadrant of the capital, it was never designated on
the same statutory basis and with an associated
strategic funding mechanism.
Until the 1980s, the Colne Valley Park remained
an exclusively local authority concept, principally
relying on planning policy and control to affect
change in support of the objectives that had been
set. Only with the advent of one of the Countryside
Commission’s new urban fringe management
projects was there any dedicated mechanism to
implement projects. This was, in effect, a precursor
to the Colne Valley Park Groundwork Trust, which
was created in 1987 to enable a ‘step-change’ in
this type of activity. Since expanded in scope as
Groundwork Thames Valley, the Trust became the
first (and until recently the only) non-local authority
member of the Colne Valley Partnership.
Specifically charged with acting as the delivery
agent of the Park on behalf of the Partnership
members, Groundwork utilises the financial
contributions made by the remaining active
members – pooled as the ‘Colne Valley Levy’ and
totalling in the order of only £40,000 per annum – to
typically multiply-up ten times that value in
investment in the Park each year. This has been
used for everything from running the principal Park
visitor centre and delivering a rolling programme of
infrastructure improvements, to promoting leisure
activity and running volunteering programmes.
The starting point for the change process was
being able to achieve a consensus on the scale of
the challenge, priorities (in relation to the emerging
new localism and ‘Big Society’ agendas), and
options for taking things forward. With the support
of the South East Green Infrastructure Partnership,
the Colne Valley Partnership engaged consultants
URBED (Urban and Economic Development Group)
to review the strengths and weaknesses of the
Colne Valley Park and its management arrangements
and the degree to which it was valued by existing
and potential new stakeholders – and to draw upon
current ‘best practice’ in the UK and Europe.
The outcomes were stark: a radical response was
needed.
Three local authority members had already given
notice to withdraw from the Partnership, and others
were having to consider their futures. Although the
two most significant contributors (Buckinghamshire
County Council and the London Borough of
Hillingdon) both remained fully committed, and a
new non-local authority member in the Chiltern
Society had been brought on board, the imminent
loss of the smaller authorities was in danger of
Town & Country Planning June 2011 : GRaBS Project – INTERREG IVC; ERDF-funded 295