The park team and volunteers have been working hard to clear stable yard in preparation for the start of the renovation work. It’s been a huge task and the team have removed, rehoused and recycled the piles of logs, metres of mismatched railings, a coracle, two horse drawn carts, old tyres, several old doors - I could go on - that have built up over the years.

The horses long since gone from the stable yard, Paul and Barry hitched the cart up to the truck and towed it through the park to its new home.

Antwerp/Anvers/Antwerpen - so good they named it thrice

And so to Antwerp for 2 days of meetings with our European partners in the Livinggreen.eu project. These twice yearly meetings are a chance to catch up on the progress of the 5 sustainable renovation projects and 2 behavioural change/awareness raising projects that make up the EU-funded Livinggreen.eu project, as well as an opportunity to share knowledge and best practice. Luckily for us the meetings are held in English.

After an environmentally friendly Eurostar journey and a local train, we arrived at the amazing art nouveau Antwerpen Centraal station. From there it’s a short walk to our Antwerp partner’s base at the EcoHuis, a renovated warehouse in a densely populated part of the city away from the historic centre.

EcoHuis is a sustainable living and advice centre. As well as providing advice and information for local people through exhibits, garden, a demonstration house and an education programme, one of the EcoHuis’s initiatives is zoominopuwdak, which my non-existent Flemish translates as ‘zoom in on your roof'. The website allows people to zoom in on an aerial thermal image photograph of Antwerp and see how well their roof performs. Poorly insulated roofs stand out in red and orange against the better insulated ones and the EcoHuis hopes this will encourage people to insulate their roof, increase the energy efficiency of their home and reduce their heating bills. It’s obviously working, as to date the EcoHuis has supported the insulation of 1000 roofs in the city.

We’ll be back at the EcoHuis in 2 weeks for EcoHuis Dokter XXL, a three day programme of seminars, workshops and exhibitions looking at sustainable renovation in the city.