New woods across North West England

A land regeneration programme, which is breathing new life into the urban areas of Greater Manchester and Merseyside has moved a step closer to expanding its activity across the whole region and becoming the UK’s largest regeneration scheme.

A contract between the Forestry Commission (FC) and Northwest Regional Development Agency (NWDA) has been signed, to release an additional £36 million of regeneration funding for the ‘Newlands’ programme.

Paul Hill Tout, director of Forestry Commission England and Joe Dwek, chair of the Environment Sub Committee for the NWDA met  to pledge to deliver the new phase of Newlands, extending the programme across the Mersey Belt, and for the first time into Cumbria, Cheshire and Lancashire.

The Newlands partnership have also begun the process of site selection for this new phase of the programme with the NWDA agreeing last week to consider nine new areas (totalling nearly 500 hectares) for possible Newlands investment.

This additional funding sees the total investment in Newlands rise to £59 million, which will cover the initial regeneration of numerous brownfield sites into new community woodland, as well as 20 years of maintenance.

Newlands - which stands for New Economic Environments through Woodlands - is working to regenerate more than 900 hectares of brownfield land across the Northwest region, encouraging economic growth and simultaneously creating new opportunities for leisure and recreation. Newlands is currently regenerating sites across Greater Manchester, Wirral and St Helens, tackling previously developed land, such as landfill sites, to improve the image of England’s Northwest.
Launched in 2003 with £23 million funding, Newlands takes an integrated and cohesive approach to addressing some of the region’s most damaged lands by creating target-driven green spaces, and using woodlands as the catalyst. Specifically, the programme has already added value to three Housing Market Renewal Pathfinders, reclaimed more than 180ha of brownfield land, created or improved 30km of pathways, and has dramatically improved key gateway sites into the region, some of the most deprived areas in Britain and enhanced business environments for inward investment across the region.

As well as enabling the regeneration of an additional 520ha of brownfield land in total, this latest NWDA funding will allow Newlands to also develop a programme of street greening (including street tree planting, and other urban greening projects) around all of the Newlands sites. Via Newlands, NWDA also provides enough resources to keep the project sites maintained for the 20 years, and the Forestry Commission enters into management contracts for all projects to maintain the sites for 99 years.

Newlands is delivered at a local level through five main local delivery partners: Red Rose Forest, The Mersey Forest, Pennine Edge Forest, Groundwork Northwest, Land Restoration Trust and Forest Commission.