主播大秀

Today, Tuesday 23 June, school children from across Bristol will be joined by Miranda Krestovnikoff and Mike Dilger for a 60-minute nature spotting Bioblitz at the new 主播大秀 Bristol Wildlife Garden. Here, Jules Hyam, creative producer for 主播大秀 West explains how the front of 主播大秀 Bristol has been transformed for wildlife.

 For 80 years the 主播大秀 has had a home in Bristol, on the busy Whiteladies Road.  It’s home to Points West, one of the UK’s most popular regional news programmes, and to big TV brands like The One Show, Springwatch and Naomi’s Nightmares of Nature.  It’s also the base for the Natural History Unit whose stunning landmark programmes delight audiences around the world. 

In the past couple of years, the site has also welcomed productions like Gardeners’ World, The Chelsea Flower Show team and Countryfile.

主播大秀 Bristol is at the heart of the world’s biggest centre of wildlife film and radio production – but in the whole time it’s been here, the image the 主播大秀 buildings present to the world has been a rather drab and uninspiring plain lawn.

It seems a little odd that while programme makers inside the buildings spend time people  ideas about how to transform their outdoor spaces for the benefit of wildlife – our own outdoor space has almost no wildlife value at all.

I’m by no means the first person who’s thought it could do with a make-over, but sometimes to ‘make things happen’ you need to suggest them at just the right time… and 2015 just happened to be the right time.

This year  and for us that was an ideal opportunity to make a contribution – to work alongside other organisations in the city to create something special… The 主播大秀 Bristol Wildlife Garden.

It began almost a year ago with a series of conversations – with television producers, horticultural researchers and crucially .  As their chief exec and I walked up and down 140 metres of lawn, we began to see that by working together, we could actually make it happen – and in a way that would engage the local community with wildlife, gardening and the natural world and leave a legacy of a valuable habitat that schools could then use as a classroom.

The plan was pretty simple – run a series of “activity days” - each hosted by a famous telly face from 主播大秀 Bristol.  Invite school children to come along and help them to learn by doing; by planting, digging and watering – by searching for wildlife and helping to create habitats, and slowly a garden would evolve.

But in order to create, we had to first destroy – and there is one Bristol TV show that’s pretty good at doing that…  so while council contractors dug up Whiteladies Road to lay new gas mains, DIY SOS parked their van on the 主播大秀 driveway and got to work, hacking and chopping and shifting and lifting tons of bricks and bushes - by hand.    

For the contractors on the main road – this was hysterical, the TV idols of the construction industry hard at work destroying their own front lawn.  After an hour the shrub branches had gone – but the root balls remained, and so did the brickwork. Another hour later and the bricks were starting to disappear – but doing things by hand was taking a while, a fact not lost on the contractors.

After another hour of wry amusement, the contractors’ foreman called an end to his team’s shift and wandered over to talk to the DIY SOS team:  “That’s going to take all day you know”, he helpfully pointed out, “I wouldn’t have done that by hand if I were you, would you like me to bring in our digger?”

It’s amazing how many people are keen to help when it’s something they think is worthwhile, without a digger the ground wouldn’t have been ready for children to plant the next day,  without University of Bristol volunteers, there wouldn’t have been holes for the apple and pear trees and without Blue Peter re-uniting the “Wild” team of Radzi, Naomi and Tim, there wouldn’t have been a pond.

I could give you lots of facts and figures or explain how we contacted every school in the city – how 15% of them have been involved, how almost 800 children have helped create the space – but they don’t explain as much about the difference the activity days have made as the looks of excitement and enthusiasm on little faces as they find out amazing facts about earthworms, pollinators and plants.

It can take three years to make a landmark natural history series, but it took just one hour - with the enthusiasm of Mike Dilger - to make one group of school children decide to set up their own bug club at their school.  After a morning with Nick Baker building bug hotels one college adopted a new conservation policy for its own site, and days led by Miranda Krestovnikoff, Naomi Wilkinson, Tom Hart Dyke and Toby Buckland have inspired schools to reclaim unused land for nature – to do their own wildlife surveys and to make use of the 主播大秀 Bristol Wildlife Garden as an outdoor classroom.

Instead of a drab lawn that looks clearly unloved, the people of Bristol have helped to create a space that is very much theirs – and is cared for.  A space with different wildlife habitats that’s available as a living outdoor classroom for any school to use.

The 主播大秀 Bristol Wildlife Garden is a partnership project with and forms part of their My Wild City initiative during Bristol’s Green Capital year.

Jules Hyam is Creative Producer for 主播大秀 West