‘Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?’*
Julia Widdows describes a new initiative to capture an up-to-date picture of the natural environment of Shoreham’s ‘Great Big Back Garden’, helping to identify priorities and opportunities for nature support and recovery.
When Friends of Old Shoreham was first established and people were asked what their interests were, the green environment of our neighbourhood turned out to be very important to residents. The Greening Old Shoreham group evolved to help maintain some of those green spaces, and The Nature Map project is an offshoot of that work. We want to find out as much as we can about the various habitats and levels of biodiversity in Old Shoreham so that we can work on protecting and enhancing what we have.
The Old Shoreham parish area stretches from the South Downs to the east bank of the River Adur and across the suburban gardens and other green spaces south to Swiss Gardens and east to Buckingham Park. It contains a really wide range of habitats, including riverside paths and the saltmarsh, a downland nature reserve, agricultural fields, bypass embankments, a cemetery, an ancient churchyard, allotments, a community orchard, long-established green verges, hedgerows, and the Buckingham estate which was designed with sympathy for trees, grassy spaces and pedestrian pathways.
We are indepted to Greening Steyning who have inspired us with their extensive Nature Map created over the last four years. We hope to join our data to theirs to build a joined-up picture of biodiversity across the river valley and Downs
We are aiming to map the green spaces and identify the trees that make up the canopy and what is growing in the under-storey. We are doing this through informal walks in the area, noting the kinds of habitat we find, based on the categories used by the Joint Nature Conservation Committee Phase 1 Habitat Survey: https://hub.jncc.gov.uk. This information will go to compiling a map which everyone can understand and use, and which joins up with the greeningsteyning.org nature map that covers Steyning, Bramber and Beeding.
We’re all volunteers with varying degrees of expertise in plant identification – or none, but learning! If you are interested in joining us you’d be welcome. Please email gosh@oldshoreham.org.
FOLDS has won funding from the National Trust Changing Chalk initiative and the Nature Map project is being helped by this. A display of the work so far will be on show at The Marlipins Museum in summer 2026.
*Big Yellow Taxi – Joni Mitchell
