The West Gorton Community Park is a £1.4m, 14,000 sq. meter ‘sponge park’ developed as part of the GrowGreen project, funded by EU Horizon 2020 which opened in July 2020. This is a new, accessible, multi-functional park designed to help the climate resilience of the local area.
It follows “sponge principles”, incorporating sustainable urban drainage (SuDS) to allow rainwater run-off from nearby roads to be channelled and filtered through natural drainage systems, slowing and reducing the flow into the normal drainage system. Development of the community park included engaging with the local community in West Gorton to ensure their ideas could be incorporated into the final design.
The park has provided a real-life example of the procurement and installation process of NBS features and provides a showcase location demonstrating NBS’s in use and the potential wider business cases for future financing of such developments. There’s a film all about West Gorton Community Park on YouTube.
