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History of the reserve
History of the reserve
First steps
Lingfield Wildlife Area (LWA) was set up in March 1994 by Tandridge District Council, at the suggestion of Lingfield Parish Council.
Its original name was The Bloomer's and Jenner's Fields Community Wildlife Area but we soon decided that was too much of a mouthful and settled on our present name.
As you might expect, our first few meetings were concerned with deciding our objectives, constitution and way of operating (see here for details).
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Principles
Under our founding chairman, District Councillor Tony Dalrymple, we agreed at the outset that the project would need to be based on local support if it was to succeed. As Brian Stearn, the Director of Planning & Environment at the District Council, had put it an earlier letter: "It is obviously important for the success of the project that the community is involved and in control".
We have stuck by that policy ever since, using outside assistance only when necessary and always under our direction. One result of this is an unusual and heartening degree of involvement from local people, who rightly see this as their reserve.
On the other hand, we have always seen it as important to seek advice from experts before deciding on a course of action. The decision is ours and the work is under our control, but we make sure we are as well informed as is practicable before proceeding with either.
Brian Stearn had also foreseen this: "It is also necessary that Tandridge District Council as the landowner and those with professional expertise in land management and community wildlife initiatives are involved to provide relevant advice when it is required".
Starting out as we meant to continue, therefore, one of our first acts was to ask the ecologists at Surrey County Council to visit the fields, to give us their opinion. This they did in March, sending us a detailed report soon after.
In June 1994, we attended an open day at Fox Corner Community Wildlife Area, near Pirbright. Not only did we come away with much invaluable advice on how to set up and run our project, we gained a vision of what was possible. It has sustained us ever since.
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The group shown here includes Fox Corner Committee members, representatives of Surrey Wildlife Trust and, from LWA, Anne Richards. They are standing on a pond dipping platform completed just a few days before.
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Getting down to it
Back at Lingfield, our first public activity, in early 1994, was a competition among local schools to design a symbol for use on our correspondence and posters. The winner was Jenna Mawji, then at Notre Dame School. Her design forms the symbol for the home page on this Web site. It can be seen in larger format here, with the other top entries. The embossed-effect version at the top of this page is scanned in from our brochure.
Work on the fields themselves began in December 1994, during The Tree Council's National Tree Week for that year. Over a hundred people turned out on a wet Saturday to help with planting a hundred-metre length of hedgerow, the start of the new Bloomer's Hedge. (See here for pictures.)
A few weeks later, local Army cadets planted our first new trees, in what is now Derek Slade Spinney (see the 1995 to 1999 pages).