Lewis | October 19, 2015 | 0 Comments
The image to your left is a photograph, courtesy of foter.com, of the stunning Natural History Museum in London. If you haven’t been before, I personally strongly recommend it; I went once on a school trip and I loved it, but not as much on my second visit in my twenties! It’s great fun for all ages and free admission only sweetens the deal, but don’t just take my word for it. The NHM received over a staggered 5 million visitors in 2012, ranking it fourth on the list of the most visited museum in the UK that year, sitting behind only the British Museum, the Tate Modern and the National Gallery.
Therefore, recent news from the Landscape Institute revealed that, due to the sheer numbers of visitors that museum attracts, the NHM are planning on building a new entrance to help ease any pedestrian congestion. On the surface, you may think this is a smart idea and yes it is. But only on the surface. The plan for the new entrance would mean destroying the museum’s wildlife garden. Stories like this are the ones we at Oakleigh Manor try to bring you through our Blog whenever they surface as we really care about our environment and the surrounding wildlife. Developing a landscape or an existing building is all well and good, but displacing an entire garden home to thousands of species is a totally different matter. Luckily, we are not alone in that respect.
When this article from the Landscape Institute was written, the petition had attracted over 4,000 signatures. However, this morning when Oakleigh Manor signed the petition too, we are one of nearly 32,000! Click on this link here to go to a Tweet on our Twitter feed that we sent immediately after signing the petition through the change.org website and sign it for yourself. However, if you need more convincing that the wildlife garden at the NHM is worth saving, read on and I will persuade you…
As I mentioned above, the wildlife garden is home to thousands of species; in fact, over 3,000 different plants and animals reside in the area. This is quite a feat, especially considering the garden, which is one acre in size, was only started 20 years ago. Such an area of biodiversity is ideal for educational purposes and that is exactly right, with thousands of schoolchildren visiting the garden every year on school trips, just like I did! Hopefully they enjoy it as much as I did, too!
If that wasn’t enough to persuade you, the article from the Landscape Institute outlines that Prospect, a union of scientists and other specialists fighting to save the garden, welcome the idea of a new entrance for the NHM to help with visitor numbers, but instead of destroying the wildlife garden, it would prefer to see a pathway be constructed around the perimeter of the area. This surely would satisfy both parties and the focus can be back on the exhibits that the museum itself provides.
Let’s hope we hear news on this soon. In the mean time, I hope you enjoyed this blog post. In fact, I hope you enjoyed so much you wish to sign the petition!
Give the rest of our Blog a look-see and keep in the touch with our Facebook and Twitter feeds for real-time news from Oakleigh Manor!
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Oakleigh Manor Limited are a multi-disciplinary company specialising in providing all outdoor needs under one roof, for all size and styles of external spaces. Our expertise has led us to numerous national awards, but what fuels us every day is the ethos we adopt: to create unique, bespoke projects. You can see perfect examples of these by looking at our Driveways page.
Photo credit: <a href=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/srboisvert/45435603/”>srboisvert</a> / <a href=”http://foter.com/”>Foter</a> / <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>CC BY</a>
