Social, Community and Cultural Benefits
"The Essex coast gets in the blood"
Green Infrastructure brings many benefits to our society and community. With good planning, it can provide us with an income, create employment, attract investment and visitors. Using green spaces can improve our physical and mental health but the social benefits are greater. Simply having a green space nearby can galvanise communities into protecting and enhancing the space because of the benefits it brings them. These spaces can become part of a community's heritage. The communities can feel very strongly about the landscape and even individual trees. Groups of neighbours form into organisations and through these structures they can take ownership and manage their local environment. Volunteers can develop their involvement from simply helping to keep a space clean to becoming a trustee. In this way green spaces can bring about social cohesion and lifelong learning. Groundwork and Big Lottery have a grant scheme called Community Spaces that recognises this close connection of people and places. The fund enables groups to create spaces for communities from gardens to play parks.
Green spaces can be a place to meet, a focal point, a landmark, they can contribute to an area’s identity or sense of place. Castle Park in Colchester is a good example. It performs a range of functions: a setting for the town’s castle, a place to play; an arena for events, a gathering place for friends on a summer evening and a source of local pride.
The landscape of the Haven Gateway has inspired artists for generations. The lowland Suffolk landscape of villages and fields along the banks of the slow flowing River Stour inspired artist John Constable.
“I associate my careless boyhood with all that lies on the banks of the Stour. Those scenes made me a painter".
John Constable.
In contrast, contemporary poet Martin Newall takes some of his inspiration from the Essex coast.
“In salt-marsh, towpath, shingle, mud
The Essex coast gets in the blood
In sea-kale, samphire, gorse and sedge
Which grows along the water's edge
Till further in, the wetland yields
To hazy summer mangold fields
The copses, hedgerows, tractor-tracks
With pallets of potato sacks"
from Shipshape, Martin Newell