Cream tea with a conscience!

Here on the Heart of the Park project, we're collecting the empty glass jars from all those cream teas you've been eating at the park's café!

But why are we collecting empty jam jars? Well, by leaving your empty jars in our hands you will be contributing to the renovation of our 19th century stableyard. Not only are we saving jam jars from the café but we are also receiving glass from the staff and volunteers that work at Morden Hall Park. Once we have collected the equivalent of two wheelie bins worth of glass, then all those jam jars will be recycled and transformed into shining new hand basin counters in the stable yard visitors' toilets.

©NTPL/David Levenson

The glass product used to make our new counters is called Glasseco, an environmentally friendly and sustainable resource made from 95% recycled glass. What's more the factory is only down the road in Crawley! This means low transportation emissions but also the Glasseco recycling factory emits low emissions too.

So you can now enjoy a guilt free cream tea at our park café. After all, cream teas are now an environmentally friendly and sustainable mode of green living...

Focus on: Family Consultation

Consultation with the local community plays a valuable and important role in the development of the HoP project. Tuesday saw the first family consultation afternoon with parents and children from Liberty School in Merton. The aims of this meeting were to paint our HoP project fundraising board as well as consult on what they would like the park to do.

When they arrived we asked the children to use their imagination and draw their ideal park. The results were very artistic and we all enjoyed trying to guess what they were drawing as their maps took shape. Excitement soon took over though when they realised they could get to work painting the fundraising board, leaving their mums to chat to Zoë, our Community Projects Manager.

Zoë asked them what they would like to see as parents of children who use the park. Their ideas, together with their children’s input, formed an interesting and creative insight into the requirements and desires of the local community. As a result we are currently looking into using some of them for future events and activities at Morden Hall Park.

The parents and children seemed to really enjoy the activity, with our youngest participant (aged two) even bursting into tears when her mum told her that the painting was finished! Needless to say, several children, mums and National Trust staff went home covered in paint; if that isn’t the mark of a successful consultation activity, I don’t know what is!

A Trundle along the Wandle

Today volunteers Josephine and Jon braved the elements in order to gain a point for the BREEAM assessment by trundling along the Wandle to measure the distances from the stable yard to the required amenities, namely a post box, a grocery shop, a cash machine, a pharmacy and a doctors' surgery. The target distance is 500m and all the amenities played ball except the post box! Whilst getting very wet in the steady drizzle, try as we might we could not shave 11 metres off the distance to the post box.

Hopefully the point that we gain from this task will contribute to a successful BREEAM assessment. Another average day for the Morden Hall Park volunteer...

More snow at Morden Hall Park and while the builders have been digging service trenches in the snow, surveying drains in the snow and shovelling snow in the snow, we have spent many a happy hour researching A+ rated fridges and finding out where the nearest cash point and pharmacy are as part of the BREEAM assessment for the project. As exciting as that sounds, it doesn't make a good picture so here's a photo Lucy took of the park instead

NTPL/Lucy Alfred

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BREEAM (Building Research Establishment’s Environmental Assessment Method) is the world’s leading and most widely used environmental assessment method for buildings. Credits are awarded in ten categories according to performance: Management, Waste, Health and Wellbeing, Pollution, Energy, Land Use and Ecology, Transport, Materials, Water and Innovation. The credits are then added together to produce a single overall score on a scale of Pass, Good, Very Good, Excellent and Outstanding.

As our project falls outside of the scope of the standard BREEAM schemes (courts, offices, prisons, beehives etc - only joking, although a beehive should score quite well considering the good potential for natural ventilation, reduced night time light pollution and easy access to outdoor space) we will be assessed under the BREEAM Bespoke process.

Our initial meeting to discuss the assessment with the consultants covered everything from the likely Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating to the distance to the nearest bus stop. Because of the high standards that we have set ourselves during the design stage and the choices we have made our Pessimistic Target Score is 'Good' and the Optimistic Target Score is 'Excellent'.

There’s a lot to do over the next few months to pull all the information together but with a predicted pessimistic score of good, it’s encouraging to know that all the discussions during the design stage about paint, insulation and our commitment to making the project as green as possible is paying off.

London-based charities add their support to the project

Metropolitan Public Gardens Association has kindly agreed to support the cost of planting new holly and box trees around the new maintenance yard. These will replace the trees that we had to remove from the area earlier this year and will significantly reduce the visual impact of maintenance yard.

Metropolitan Public Gardens Association helps protect, preserve and improve London’s open spaces to improve the local environment and been helping to improve amenities along the river Wandle, which flows through Morden Hall Park, since 1910. Long may it continue.

Heritage of London Trust have agreed to contribute towards the restoration of the original Victorian stalls within the stable yard. Preserving and restoring these important historic features of the building will help interpret the history of the stable yard. The restored stalls will be rented to local craft workers and artists.

The Heritage of London Trust is the only building preservation trust to cover all the London boroughs. It provides small grants to help restore specific architectural features of historic buildings which are used by the public or community.

A big thank you to both organisations for bringing us nearer to our fundraising target.

Let it snow - just not too much

© NTPL / Jon Whitehead 

© NTPL / Jon Whitehead

After snow stopped work on the building site for two days last week, the milder weather over the weekend has melted most of the snow in the park and the builders have been able to get back to work today digging new drainage and services trenches.

It’s still too cold to pour the concrete for the floor slab - the temperature needs to be 1˚C and rising and it was -2˚C this morning - so here are some pretty pictures that Jon, a volunteer working on the project took of the stable yard covered in snow instead.

Insulation, insulation, insulation

This is the first in a series of posts about how we are going to insulate the walls, floors and ceilings in the stable yard building. Sound dull? Well don’t switch off just yet and because according to the Energy Saving Trust around half of heat loss in a typical home is through the walls and loft.

One of the many discussions we have had whilst developing the project is what materials to use to insulate the stable yard’s floors, walls and roof spaces. We wanted to demonstrate various different insulation options to suit a range of budgets and we also had to consider how the insulation would perform in a building which is on the flood plain and which needs to breathe. We finally settled on a range of products, from cutting-edge new materials to traditional and recycled materials such as sheep’s wool and cork, more of which later.

The first areas of the building to be insulated are the floors in the rooms on the west side of the building and so after a brief appearance, the 17th century wall has been covered up again with an 18cm thick layer of Celotex.

That’s it for now but watch this space for the next instalment in our series on insulation. It’s guaranteed to make you feel all warm inside...