The vigilante mowers of Rayneham Road in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, don’t look like dissidents. Ranging in age from 49 to 68, most have adult children and comfortably sized houses in a quiet corner of the East Midlands. They are not people you might usually associate with a picket line. But when the council stopped mowing the communal green space opposite their redbrick houses as part of a borough-wide rewilding scheme, it wasn’t long before mutiny took hold.
The grass reached hip height. Fears about dog poo, litter and ticks spread. Residents felt there was nowhere for visiting grandchildren to run amok or play football. “It was up to my daughter’s nose at one point,” says 54-year-old teacher Marnay Dudley. “I found it so depressing,” says her retired neighbour Moira Barclay.
The revolt began with 60-year-old customer service worker Martin White. “Looking out my window, I just couldn’t bear to see it,” he says. “So I took the lawnmower out.” Soon, his retired neighbour Gary Wheatley, 63, joined him. Then Dudley’s husband, John. And then the whole street was getting their hands dirty – raking up the shorn grass and gleefully clumping it into wheelbarrows. At one point in the multiday rebellion, there were five lawnmowers on the go. “It really brought the community together,” says 68-year-old retired science technician Linda Lee. People got to know neighbours they previously hadn’t uttered more than a few words to. A jug of squash was shared around. Lee’s husband, Mark, even shelled out hundreds of pounds for a secondhand ride-on mower that he spent hours fixing up in the garage.
“We felt like rebels,” says Barclay, 68, who filmed the revolt and put it on Facebook. With the sun coming weakly through the clouds and the grass flying up from the mower blades at a furious clip, the scene appears less one of an anti-council insurgency than an ambient episode of Countryfile. “We don’t get much trouble around here,” says Lee. “But at the end of the day, you’d just have to get some teenagers coming along, dropping a match down, and it would have gone up.” She pauses. “We also found out that it’s devaluing our properties. We don’t want that in this area.”
Like one in five county councils across Great Britain, Derbyshire county council have embraced rewilding on public land. With nearly one in six species in the UK at risk of extinction, more than half of our flowering plants having decreased in number, a flying insect population reduced by up to 78% over the past 20 years, and 97% of species-rich grassland now lost, it’s a grimly necessary project.
The scheme, called Wild About Erewash, was signed off by the council in March, and has seen most of the borough’s green spaces adopt a more natural – or bedraggled, depending on who you ask – aesthetic. Formal planting has stopped, hanging baskets have been removed, weed-killer use has been reduced and long grass is now the norm in parks and on road verges. Mowing is mostly confined to recreational areas and margins, which will create paths for walkers.
But with council tax bills climbing by 3% this year and service provision ostensibly nosediving, Erewash residents aren’t convinced of its virtues. “From a council perspective, I think it’s very disingenuous that they suggested a rewilding project is for the purposes of nature and the environment,” says IT manager Paul Miller, 49, who helped his neighbours bale up the grass on Rayneham Road. “I think it’s very clear that it was about saving money. For me, if they’d come out and said as a council: ‘We’re skint. We’re not going to cut the grass,’ it would have been a different thing.”
The residents of Rayneham Road are far from alone in their concerns about Erewash council’s rewilding scheme; even if they were the first to start a de facto meadow war. A change.org petition started by a local Conservative councillor, Wayne Major, has more than 1,600 signatures. Another local Tory councillor in the nearby village of Sawley, Paul Maginnis, went on GB News to lament the whole “woke nonsense”, saying that the youth club he runs no longer has space for children to play football amid the long grass.
Growing pains aren’t unusual for a scheme like Wild About Erewash. In Brighton, one resident ended up in A&E after stumbling over weeds growing on the pavement. Devon locals have complained that overgrown grass in a cemetery is disrespectful to the grieving. But the Erewash scheme is unusual in the volume of hapless headlines it’s managed to generate in its short existence. Woke rewilding, summers snatched from children, rats, dog poo, ticks – the coverage couldn’t conceivably have been worse. Most of the bad press stemmed from a fraught full council meeting at Ilkeston town hall on 1 August, where the Labour administration fielded written questions from residents about everything from the possibly “devastating” implications of tick bites to discarded nitrous oxide canisters – a potential “gateway to substance abuse”, as one parent put it.
In the course of an afternoon spent in Ilkeston’s residential areas, I hear the scheme called “disgusting”, “diabolical”, “a mess” and “ridiculous”. “It makes you feel like you don’t want to live around here any more,” says Mair Whalley, 77, who’s out walking her dog, Ted, on the edge of Shipley Country Park. “It was supposed to be like a meadow. It doesn’t look much like a meadow to me. Maybe we should stop paying our council tax.”
Last year, Derby council announced what’s set to be the biggest urban rewilding site in England at Allestree Park – the largest open space in the city. But many residents in neighbouring Erewash say they only heard about their own borough’s rewilding scheme by looking out their windows and noticing that grass on verges, roundabouts and in parks hadn’t been cut. Many people are wondering where the flowers are and what the rewilding scheme actually entails.
“It is a nice idea really badly implemented and even more poorly communicated,” says James Archer, a parish councillor who stood as the Liberal Democrat candidate for Erewash at the last general election. “No Mow May has now become Can’t be Arsed August,” resident John McBride writes to me via email. “The standard of public areas has massively decreased.”
By the time I visit Ilkeston, news of the Rayneham Road uprising seems to have become local legend; several people bring it up with a glint of delight in their eye. “The scheme is like everything,” says Steve Jones, 56, who is out walking his dog, Aggie, on the picturesque Nutbrook Trail. “You have to try to please everyone.” But what happens when no one ends up pleased? Does the Erewash problem stem from residents resisting crucial change in the face of the biodiversity crisis, or has this well-intentioned initiative unwittingly become the Willy Wonka experience of local authority rewilding schemes?
“It’s a necessary project,” says Thomas Hollier, 24, an environment coach managing nature reserves for local charity Groundwork Five Counties. “It’s always going to look its worst in the first year. It needs time. This is a fairly wealthy area, and that tends to come with people wanting everything to look perfect.”
Hollier points out that leaving cut grass on the surface means that it “essentially just mulches over, and you’re not going to get any wild flowers through because that mulch would just build up to a thatch, which would be a physical barrier to any wild flowers”. But the “cut and collect” approach – which conservation charity Plantlife recommends as a way of reducing fertility and regrowth, and increasing biodiversity and carbon within the soil – will be implemented one or two years into the plan. That’s once the requisite equipment had been bought by the council, and the grass had been given a fallow period, insists Mark Alfrey, Erewash council’s lead member for environment.
“Without allowing that grass to grow – which initially does look unkempt – we don’t have an understanding of what the seed bank is there,” says the Labour councillor. Having taken on the role in May, Alfrey says he “does not know how the policy was drawn up”, but bats away the suggestion that he wishes it hadn’t been. That said, he’s under no illusions as to the shoddy communication of the project in its infancy.
“When we took over, we faced a significant financial black hole, and lots of tough decisions were made to balance the budgets,” he says, “but the rewilding strategy that I developed is not about short-term cost savings. It’s about a long-term initiative that leads to environmental dividends year on year. The message could have been delivered differently … but this is now happening across the country,” he says in response to residents’ concerns. He adds that any savings made on green space management in the borough came from the decision to get rid of formal planting and sow the beds with wild-flower seeds instead.
But with the Conservative-controlled Derbyshire council as cash-strapped as many others across the country, and running a budget gap of more than £39m for the year 2024/25, any cost saving surely helps. “Green space management in Erewash is under a lot of fiscal stress,” says Alfrey. “The budget for verges, tree maintenance and street cleaning hasn’t increased for a decade.”
Alfrey says he is planning to make adjustments – namely, widening paths for walkers and implementing informal play spaces – having consulted external experts in the field. As for the poo problem … well, he says, it’s not his. “I’m not going to be offended when people say that long grass supports dog poo and litter. I would disagree. Long grass doesn’t support littering. Littering is antisocial behaviour, and dog poo is irresponsible dog owners not wanting to clear up.”
The problem, says Stephen Carver, professor of rewilding and wilderness science at the University of Leeds, may be calling these initiatives “rewilding” in the first place. That implies ceding control to nature. What’s going on here is more “habitat restoration”, a more managed process where humans still call the shots.
Other councils have been more cautious in their employment of the term: Birmingham council, which has worked towards improving water quality to support otters in the city’s canal network, has opted not to use it in case it’s misinterpreted as the total restoration of ecosystems, and the reintroduction of wolves, lynx, bison and beavers.
Things “can often go wrong if suddenly mowing simply stops, and then people see tall growth and that triggers a whole set of concerns,” says Mark Schofield, road verges adviser at Plantlife. “It’s really important to think about how you might transition from the frequently mown short turf scenario and move towards a manageable wildflower-rich meadow environment.”
Schofield says best practice is to divide the area in question into zones. “You can almost imagine yourself as a DJ with a mixing deck and a cross-fading switch where you can adjust the relative proportions of your functional turf, your flowering lawn, your wild-flower meadow, your rough grass and then even your hedgerow and scrubby woodland,” he says.
The “mow less” message seems to be slowly getting through, at any rate: 40 councils pledged to leave their verges and parks to grow as part of this year’s No Mow May. Given that the cumulative area of road verges in Britain is the same size as Dorset, that feels like no small feat.
Responding to residents’ criticism, Alfrey says he has never been more convinced of the project’s importance. “There’s been a lot of noise because it’s a bold departure for the council, and I’ve openly admitted that it’s been a learning curve,” he says. “But I’m very confident that this is a deliverable plan. I’m just disappointed that, in the first year it was rolled out, there have been these teething issues.” He says the council had big plans for the denuded green space on Rayneham Road. “It had one of the most diverse seed banks in Erewash. I can’t tell you what would’ve happened there, because residents cut the grass.”
With research suggesting that humans will push further into wildlife habitats across more than half the land on Earth by 2070, it is likely going to get much uglier than uncut verges. “Memories are being lost of how enriched our every day was in terms of our biodiversity,” says Schofield.
But overlooking the Barling Drive play area in Ilkeston, its climbing frame hemmed in by long grass, Wheatley isn’t convinced. He says that he and his neighbours will keep on mowing in the absence of council intervention. “It shouldn’t be our job to do it. The alternative is to let it go back to wild,” he says. Lee stops him in his tracks: “My husband won’t ever let it go back to that. He’ll come home this weekend and he’ll be out there again on the ride-on mower. I know he will.”
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