Schools had cake sales and staged protests, supporters did sponsored bike rides and walks, musicians held fundraising concerts, and a theatre group wove the story into a performance piece. Children even sent in their pocket money.
And on Friday, they saw the results when the residents of Brockley, south-east London, proudly announced they had won a race against time to raise the £100,000 to buy Gorne Wood, the closest surviving patch of ancient woodland to the City of London, from developers.
Tucked between a row of back gardens and the railway line to London Bridge, the three-acre wood is a rare surviving fragment of the Great North Wood, a forest that once spanned the highground between Deptford and Selhurst.
Over hundreds of years, gnarly oaks, field maples and even elms have grown there, providing a sheltered habitat for slow worms and endangered hedgehogs, and nesting sites for sparrowhawks, owls and woodpeckers.
The land was declared a public park 100 years ago to thank Brockley scouts for patrolling nearby railway bridges during the first world war. But in the 1980s it was sold by railway administrators, and in 2004 the scouts were evicted from their hut.
Neglected, the site fell into disrepair, attracting flytippers, hard drug users, runaways and sex workers. Fears for its future were such that the Campaign to Protect Rural England named it on its top 10 green spaces in London that needed rescuing.
In 2021, community campaigners led by the Fourth Reserve Foundation, which manages a nature reserve backing on to the same section of railway track, launched a campaign to raise the money to buy the land.
They had to move fast, however, as its designation as an asset of community value only had months left before it was due to expire and the site was potentially lost to the community for ever.
Anna-Maria Cahalane, who lives close by, had first begun looking at the site with her neighbours in 2017, after they noticed damage at its edges was getting worse. They contacted the landowner. “We basically got told it was none of our business,” she said. “And that triggered a lot of concerns about the land itself.”
As they researched the wood, they discovered it was a metropolitan site of importance for nature conservation, and they commissioned ecological surveys to establish its value.
After an application to the council, Gorne Wood was designated as an asset of community value, preventing its owner from selling it on without giving the community first dibs.
Then, in 2020, the community successfully applied for it to be designated as “ancient woodland”, meaning it has been continuously wooded for 400 years.
“We were able to look at the maps from 1600 onwards to see how the area had developed in terms of housing, but how this little patch of the Great North Wood, the trees on it, remained all the way through,” Cahalane said.
“Even through the bombings of the second world war, when the scout hut was bombed and all the houses were bombed, the trees survived. The more we learned about the site, the more special it became.”
The additional designations made it ever harder for the owner to develop the land. But when the community approached Lewisham council to ask if it would buy the land, the council said it could not afford it. Meanwhile, the clock was ticking on its asset of community value designation, which expire after just five years.
So the community launched a campaign to raise the money to buy Gorne Wood themselves. Under the terms of its original designation, they had until the end of this month to raise the cash. As of Friday, they had raised £114,000, Calahane said.
The struggle is not quite over, however. Lewisham council has agreed to make the CPO on the community’s behalf, but the process is complex and could take up to two years. Until then, the people of Brockley may have to watch Gorne Wood continue to be used as a dumping ground. On 31 January, the owner of the site is appealing against a council order to clean it up and make it safe.
“It shouldn’t be allowed to happen,” Calahane said. “The process should be much, much easier for councils, and for communities, to bring land back into community hands where it can be looked after. It’s a climate emergency. And it’s crazy that these situations should still be here.”
