The first Sunday in September marked the Grove Park Carnival at Chinbrook Meadows. The event is a family friendly event with a dog show, funfair, parade and a variety of stalls including some that were teaching the public about the River Quaggy and the animals within it. Thames21, Friends of Chinbrook Meadows, The Quekett Microscopical Club and ChART were all in attendance.
Our friends The Quekett Microscopical Club have written a wonderful blog all about the day HERE on their website.
Continuing on from last month, we spent the first couple of weeks in July taking part in the 3 Rivers Clean Up. After 3 weeks of being in river we removed over 5000 Himalayan balsam plants from the River Quaggy and River Ravensbourne.
One fantastic sighting when we were downstream of Manor Park was a large European Eel feeding amongst the gravel riverbed. Can you spot it in the photo below?
Whilst in Manor Park it was also wonderful to look at the bug hotels that the 12th North Lewisham Scout Group have been looking after.
Back in 2021 Dr Louise Rondel and colleagues at Goldsmith’s University captured a series of interviews and sounds along the River Quaggy, exploring the soundscape of the urban River Quaggy.
The project strived to understand how the river impacts the local area and vice versa through an interactive app, the public contributed their own field recordings at the participatory workshop and sound walk, and talks from resident scientific and cultural experts, including John Drever and Emma Jackson, about the importance of the river to both the community and local eco-system.
Learn how people interact with the Quaggy and how this heavily engineered South London river is becoming re-naturalised. All done in conjunction with the Quaggy Waterways Action Group (QWAG).
Listen and explore the soundscape at https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/sounding-the-river-quaggy_679393#14/51.4599/0.0087
June marks the beginning of the Three Rivers Clean Up, also known as 3RCU, for the London Borough of Lewisham. Rivers & People, Nature’s Gym and various river projects/ user groups combine to make a group effort to remove Himalayan Balsam before it seeds around the banks of the three rivers.
Whilst bashing the Himalayan balsam we also litter pick the channels and take the what3words locations of any other invasive plant species, such as Japanese Knotweed and Giant Hogweed. These plants get treated and tackled by the wider Glendale team, whilst we focus our efforts on the Balsam.
Read more about the 3RCU initiative at https://3riverscleanup.co.uk/
Over the last 2 weeks, the Nature Conservation team has been joined by Sophia who wished to carry out her work experience with us. Here she writes about her time. We wish Sophia well in the future.
Being an A level geography student and an avid environmentalist, I did two weeks of work experience with Nature Conservation Lewisham. Having lived in Lee or Grove Park for all of my life, I feel passionate about the borough I live in and the importance of allowing for young people like myself to support it and help prevent potential future damage to it. This was what inspired me to work with Nature Conservation Lewisham.
The work was hugely varied and involved working in a variety of situations including working with primary school aged children in public green spaces, cleaning rivers, and removing invasive plant species from riverbanks. Working outdoors allowed for me to gain practical experience and be able to face and resolve potential challenges such the impacts of the weather and finding unexpected numbers of a plant species. I thoroughly enjoyed the variety and unpredictable nature of the work in that each day we would be working on different tasks each day and not visiting one place more than once. This allowed for me to plan ahead and demonstrate the skills and ability to complete tasks of strongly different disciplines; one day we could be waist length deep in mud and river water removing Himalayan Balsam, and the next we would be in a park counting and observing birds. How different this is to most people’s perceptions of work: 9-5 hours at a desk doing a fairly predictable job in a centrally heated building wearing a suit!
The people I was working with were friendly and welcoming (special thanks to Jess and Emily!) and I immediately felt like one of them and part of their projects as soon as I started work at Nature Conservation Lewisham and felt that it was a very supportive working environment.
I wish the organisation and its people all the best for the future and (despite the awkwardness of having a large proportion of cold and dirty river water enter my wader when I was in the river) feel proud to have had the chance to work with them and feel that this would be a unique and interesting opportunity to reflect on and relate to when I complete my A levels and go on to do a human geography degree in the not-so-distant future.
May saw a varied programme for our volunteers, from taking part in the EU-wide Preventing Plastic Pollution‘s #PlasticBlitz event to water quality testing to heavy silt removal in a pond fed by one of Lewisham’s rivers.
We were also joined by a group of students from Goldmith’s University who are looking into prevalence of plastics and invasive species in Rivers in urban areas.
Summer is when we start tackling some of our invasive species in the river and on the banks, which is both great for the health of the rivers and great at keeping you fit!
Why not join our Tuesday volunteer sessions? The volunteer session programme has now been released for July to September 2023. Check out the programme HERE. If you would like to get involved in volunteering on Lewisham’s rivers please read through the the River Volunteering web page, and if you have any questions or queries please get in touch with Emily.
April had our volunteer team venture to Beckenham Place Park to clear the river channel of large fallen tree branches, obstructions and litter. All removed branches were cut down and used to create habitat piles along the higher banks.
After a successful grant award from Groundworks, Rivers & People joined forces with the Friends of Chinbrook Meadows for a celebration event for how diverse the park is. Read more about the event at https://chinbrookmeadows.wordpress.com/. Twenty different species of aquatic species were found during the day of pond dipping, including smooth newts and common frogs.
March gave our volunteer team some kinder weather, which was particularly welcomed as we spent 3 weeks in Ladywell Fields (North Field) widening the secondary channel around the bridges. Since the works have been completed at the entrance to the secondary channel you can now see the channel filled with water everyday through the field. As this waterflow moves through the channel it naturally erodes areas of the banks where it is moving fastest and drops silt in the slower areas. This is a wonderful natural process to watch happening through the middle of the park. Our volunteers have managed to rework the meander by the middle bridge to reduce any erosion where the bridge is connected to the path, and to open up the inflow channel to the backwater located here.
Further south into the borough our volunteer team have been removing litter and being vigilant for invasive non-native plant species in the Manor Park section of the River Quaggy.
A WaterBlitz is a water sampling event that helps provide a snapshot of pollution issues across a river’s catchment area.
This event is for local people and citizen scientists to take water samples of points of interest to them across the Ravensbourne Catchment (which includes the Ravensbourne, Pool, Chaffinch Brook, The Beck, Quaggy, Kyd Brook) to identify ongoing pollution issues impacting the catchment’s water quality. This event will also be an important opportunity to sample areas in the catchment that generally have relatively good water quality to understand how poorer quality stretches of our rivers could perform throughout the catchment in the absence of pollution challenges.
There is booking page for people to sign up
Rivers and People 