A derelict piece of land left over when a new school was built in County Durham has been give a new lease of life.
Children from Consett Academy and a local charity got together to create a colourful garden for the school's 1,400 pupils to use in their break times.
The garden, which is inside the school's grounds, was too contaminated by glass and rubble to be laid to lawn when the school was built in 2012, so was fenced off and out of bounds for the pupils. But thanks to Consett charity Building Self-Belief and a grant from the National Lottery, it has been transformed to a peaceful area, with planting and seating to allow the pupils to enjoy time out in their day.
The land was ready to be worked on in 2020, but Covid hit, meaning the Year Nine pupils and charity volunteers had even more work on their hands when they finally started the garden, after it had become overgrown during the pandemic.
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The garden was launched this week, and Building Self-Belief's CEO Christine Thomas said the transformation from an unwelcome unlived space to a fabulous new garden for all students to enjoy had been amazing to see. "What a transformation. What was an unloved area is now bright and inviting and at a stage where the students can really experiment with growing their own food and cultivating their own flowers," she said. "It will be used as a wellbeing space for the students, as well as an outdoor classroom where a whole variety of students can access and use the space."
The garden was designed with sustainability in mind, with items reused and repurposed to give them a new lease of life. "Rather than waste any of the resources we had, we made sure that could give everything a new purpose and a new home," said Christine. "At first, we thought we should have a new seating area. We then experimented with some outdoor paint and decided that it looked brilliant and kept it in place. We used acrylic pens to draw designs on our new pots, this gave them more personalised look. Painting rocks was a popular activity, and part of the wellbeing scheme is to leave the painted rocks for other students to find in the garden.
“This has been a fabulous transformation project. Seeing the results of our work, and recognising the new found skills of the young people has been amazing. They have been brilliant throughout the whole project, and their new found interest and enthusiasm for gardening will stay will then forever. We love the new space, and the fact that many more young people will now get the opportunity to enjoy it.”
Sharon Hopkins of Consett Academy said: “Because of Building Self-Belief, we have actually achieved our goal of making the area safe and serviceable. We now have a dedicated area for wildlife, wild stock sowed, and new trees planted to enhance attraction of wildlife. Through Christine and Holly from Building Self-Belief we have now transformed that area to becoming wildlife and Eco friendly, huge thank you from 9H and myself for their unwavering financial and practical support. We love our new garden.”
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