Our story
Lockleaze Neighbourhood Trust is a registered charity run by residents, volunteers and small staff team in the North Bristol residential neighbourhood of Lockleaze. We believe that life is better in community, and we support healthy happy lives by listening to residents, connecting them with each other, supporting access to information, skills and opportunities, advocacy and making great things happen in the area. We do this through a number of projects and initiatives, including Really Wild Lockleaze.
Lockleaze has an abundance of green space including big gardens, housing greens and roadside verges. Really Wild Lockleaze is a project is helping Lockleaze residents transform these areas making them beautiful and full of wildlife, improving health, wellbeing and enjoyment of our local area.
We’re showing what an urban community can do to help nature and at the same time enrich our own community. We are creating new wild spaces on our greens and gardens, abundant with butterflies, bees, birds, and frogs! Neighbours, working together, are growing new connections and opportunities for community, friendship, and more.
We are working with an ecologist from Avon Wildlife Trust, and in 2024 we were awarded a Bee Bold Award from the West of England Combined Authority for our work supporting pollinators.
Our advice
Nature is important to many, many different kinds of people. When speaking to people about protecting nature in Lockleaze, we have been really heartened to discover just how much people in the community are already doing to support wildlife, and how much they care about protecting green spaces.
Lockleaze Neighbourhood Trust is one of six Bristol organisations, all representing communities experiencing multiple deprivation who have traditionally been excluded from the climate change debate and responses to it, that are being funded as part of the Bristol Community Climate Action Project. Funded by the National Lottery Communities Fund, this project has involved developing a Community Climate Action plan in collaboration with the local community.
The Community Climate Action plan was built on conversations in real life, over Zoom and through social media. We used the data and the aspirations of residents expressed at events through conversations and surveys. We built on existing knowledge from the community plan and the current baseline of what was already happening in Lockleaze at the beginning of the project.
The National Lottery is funding each partner to take forward part of their plan. We are taking forward actions for nature. This builds on things Lockleaze cares about, tackles threats to nature from all the housing developments and also looks at the actions we can take in our own homes and gardens to support a Really wild Lockleaze.
Really Wild Lockleaze is featured on a recent episode of the Carbon Copy Podcast. Listen to All Nature: Positively Buzzing to learn more!
Our metrics
- Number of trees planted
- Number of ponds created
- Number of conversations about nature
- Number of volunteers
- Metres square of wildflower meadow created
- Number of nature-friendly gardens
