Member Article

Giving nature a home: Wild residents move into Barratt Developments

Local housebuilder, Barratt Developments Yorkshire West is celebrating the popularity of its gold standard wildlife friendly show home gardens at St Andrew’s Place, which have been installed as part of its ongoing partnership with The Royal Society for the Protection of Bird (RSPB).

Designed in line with RSPB standards, the gold standard gardens aim to highlight the importance of protecting and encouraging local wildlife in the areas in which Barratt Developments builds. To achieve the gold level RSPB accreditation, the show home gardens have been fitted with a variety of features to create an ideal environment for wildlife including birdhouses, bug boxes, bee hotels, hedgehog houses and highways to help nature find a home navigate their environments easily, a pond to house amphibians visitors, log stores, water butts and wildflower areas.

Barratt Developments has been partnered with RSPB since 2014, with a continuation until 2022 announced. The partnership has been a resounding success, with both organisations working together to agree best practice on the types of plants and shrubs to use in gardens, the ideal times in the year to survey local species and how to make good use of existing natural features on new build developments. This expands further into 2020, with Barratt Developments planning to introduce wildlife friendly standards to all new show home gardens, as well as committing to encouraging residents and local communities to transform their own gardens.

Sam Wood, Sales Director at Barratt Developments Yorkshire West commented: “The RSPB is a fantastic organisation which leads the way in UK wildlife conservation. We are so proud to have worked alongside the RSPB for the last six years and to have together created and protected thriving environments at our developments. We’re looking forward to producing more habitats at our sites and to see the local wildlife bloom across West Yorkshire.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Richard Savage .