Environment

Visitors enjoying the Award Winning Wrabness Bee Friendly Garden in the sunshine

We are committed to Network rails promise to look after nature around the railway and help it flourish. By protecting and maintaining their habitats, we’ll help to enhance biodiversity across rail’s landscape by 2035. We work with amazing groups like the Bee Friendly Trust, who not only help us with creating fantastic planters to invite our bee friends, but also educate people on the importance of bees. Did you know there are over 250 different types of bee in the UK, from bees like the Masonry bee that prefers to live in walls, Honeybees who work as a hive and the Bumblebee who often live in colonies under the ground. Bees are in trouble due to pesticides, climate change and habitat loss, we have to protect our bees, buy planting things that will help them. Leave your dandelions early in the year, they give bees a much needed boost after their winter slumber.

The Dry Garden in front of Dovercourt Station

In 2023 we started our seed exchange with our volunteer station adopters. Because everyone grows different plants on their stations, why not share these seeds with other adopters and members of the public, so they can grow more wonderful plants and flowers from seed. It was a great success and continues to grow along the entire area of the Greater Anglia catchment. Have you collected seeds from your plants as they die off each year? Would you like to start your own seed exchange? Why not approach your local refill shop or community hub to see if they would be interested in starting one, it’s not just for flower seeds, you could swap veg seeds too and even seedlings and plants in the spring.

A home for insects, one of the many bug hotels at our stations

We have also worked with the Royal Horticultural Society to provide information to our volunteers about what to plant in a changing climate. With rising temperatures and less water in the summer, many of our station adopters have created a mediterranean dry garden to bring diversity into their stations, some have even started herb gardens for rail travellers to pick from.

There are six million trees across the whole of the rail network in the UK and the plants and trees along the tracks form green corridors for wildlife, by creating gardens and planters at our stations, our volunteer station adopters continue that biodiversity onto the stations. Can you spot the bug hotels and bird boxes created by our station adopters and local men’s sheds at some of our stations on your route?

Artwork

We engage with young people through youth groups like the Scouts and Guides as well as schools and colleges to educate the next generation about the need for wildlife in our lives. Some of the artwork on our stations are done by these young people, commissioned by the ESSCRP to instil a sense of pride and ownership of the stations near where they live.

A nest of owlets in the magical community garden behind Alresford station

Some of our station adopters have made station gardens that are so magical they even have fairy houses and meanders where children and adults alike find wonder and a connection to nature that might not always be so easy to find elsewhere.
By working with our volunteer station adopers and local communities we like to think we engage the wider community in our mission to make our stations and station gardens a beautiful, wildlife filled green space to wait for your next train.