The Bear-pit of negativity
Bristol City Council have “commenced a four-week programme to create green roofs on the former toilet blocks” in the Bearpit, “turning them into wildflower meadows,” the mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees, announced on his blog on 29 January.
“The native flowers will add to the biodiversity and attract pollinators,” he goes on to say, “in a space dominated by concrete and busy roads. They will have a waterproof layer, topped with a recycled stone substrate layer and then sown with a wildflower meadow seed. Once it grows, it will become a mix of colourful native wildflowers and grasses, which are low maintenance, and drought tolerant to minimise water consumption and be resilient to climate change.”
What he doesn’t say in his blog is that the urban food-growing movement, Incredible Edible, were dismissed from volunteering at the Bearpit and instead, £58,000 was given to roofers from Newbury to do the work.
I wrote about this in November when the contract was revealed.
Incredible Edible Bristol had been volunteering at the pedestrianised site for four years but were told in March 2020 to stop because the council had plans for the area.
By that point, the volunteers had spent over 4,500 hours (at £11.06/hr), equivalent to over £50,000, not including the founder, Sara Venn’s, work once a week, and had just received funding for further work.
Venn wrote in a blogpost, “The plants are all overgrown, it’s covered in litter and filth, and it feels immensely disrespectful that a space that had been worked on entirely voluntarily, and which over the years had only cost Bristol City Council £7,500 in funding in the first year, has been left to rack and ruin.”
She called for the council “to return the Bearpit to us, and fund us to do the work to recreate a garden that had international acclaim.”
Days later, the council awarded that £58,000 contract to a roofing company from Berkshire to build two roof gardens on disused toilets to “help soften the landscape around the Bearpit and add to the more welcoming environment being developed."