Green Flag for Minet

28 July 2009

Minet pipeline route (photo: H Demopoulos)

Minet Country Park has matured and developed into a well-loved and highly valued country park and this has now been recognised with a Green Flag Award! Green Flag is the national standard to recognise and reward the best green spaces in the country. To achieve the award Minet had to show it met the standard, including being clean and well maintained, sustainably managed, have community involvement and appropriate conservation management.

Ongoing developments

Minet woodland (photo: H Demopoulos)

There are several local developments impacting the park, these keep the team busy ensuring that that the qualities that make the park so special are not lost. The gas pipeline across the park has now been buried. National Grid will reseed the area affected in September and the area will be fenced off for a further 12 months to allow regrowth to take place. The housing development to the south of the park on the former gasworks site is now at the planning stage. One of the significant impacts on the park will be a road to be constructed across the SW corner which is the most wooded area of the park and we are supporting Hillingdon in discussions with the developers regarding mitigation and S.106 funding for the park. Finally there is an application for a banked cycle track within the existing cycle track - at the southern end of the meadow which will remove an important area for ground nesting birds such as the Skylark (pictured above left, photo S. Leedham). The design has been modified which has reduced the impact somewhat but we need wisdom in ongoing developments regarding this application.