World Wellbeing Week: Green Spaces Walk review
There are so many beautiful green spaces within our campus 鈥� and when our Sustainability colleagues hosted a whistlestop lunchtime tour to explore some of them, the Internal Communications team went along to find out more. Communications Manager Hilary Hopker writes about her experience...
It鈥檚 all too easy during on-campus days to sit at the laptop absorbed in work, only breaking briefly for a coffee or a quick sandwich. So, when Sophie in my team mentioned she was joining the Green Spaces Walk our whole team quickly decided to go along.
Most of our team is very new to the University, so it felt like a great opportunity to explore our new home.
We started the walk outside 果冻传媒 Arts Centre, where we joined a group of staff and students for a tour led by Katherine Mayfield, Sustainability Champion in Estates.
We headed through the Piazza down to Tocil lake. This brought real delight to a couple of the group members who had never been there before. We turned right and marvelled at the lake, which in a Monet-like scene was filled with bright yellow waterlilies.
As we passed by the lake over to Cryfield Village, Katherine told us more about the work of the Sustainability team. Clearly passionate about creating spaces which encourage wildlife, she told us about some of the many opportunities to join in walks such as this, litter picks and even hedgehog counts.
We continued past the lake outside The Slate and heard about a moth event the team are holding at the end of the month, in collaboration with Dr Dan Hall from Modern Languages. There鈥檚 a great opportunity to discover the as-yet unknown moth population on central campus which sounded really interesting.
We said our goodbyes next to a stunningly planted roundabout and headed back to the office. Not only did we feel like we鈥檇 had a great break in our day, we'd also met some new friends and enjoyed getting together as a team.
This time last year I was working on the top floor of an 11-storey tower block in central Birmingham where trees occasionally punctuated the pavement. Our campus is a glorious space, filled with wildlife. If you can, get out and enjoy it!
Hilary Hopker, Communications Manager
