Open Spaces | Stratton St Margaret Parish Council

Our Parks & Open Spaces

The Open Spaces Team is dedicated to maintaining all public areas throughout the parish and has a great amount of knowledge and experience with which to do it. It’s a huge labyrinth of land that includes larger parks, smaller green spaces and roadside verges and all that they encompass.

It requires a large, well organised and very determined effort to keep all of our land clean and tidy and our assets up to date. We have 10 people in our department.

What we manage

We manage less than 100 acres of land but it’s split into more than 100 land parcels.
Our 4 largest land parcels are; Merton Fields 17.5 acres, Meadowcroft Park 14 acres, Greenbridge Recreation Ground 7 acres, Grange Park 5.2 acres and St Margaret’s Cemetery 3.8 acres.
We have machinery to aid us in our work including; 1 tractor with a variety of implements to attach, 1 smaller tractor with loader, 4 large ride on mowers and 1 mini digger.
We mow our grass every 3 weeks usually starting end of March until the end of October. Some priority areas such as children’s play areas and sheltered accommodation bungalows are done fortnightly.
We have around 8 miles of hedges that are trimmed 1-3 times a year depending on priority.
We spend around £75,000 a year clearing rubbish and emptying our 137 bins. 2 men do this full time working very efficiently.
We have 2 active and beautifully maintained cemeteries and we provide full burial services. In 2022 we carried out 24 full burials and 45 ashes interments in total.

Maintaining our Open Spaces

We spend around £15,000 annually hiring independent surveyors and tree surgeons to aid the maintain our trees. We hire tree surgeons about once a fortnight.
We have 2 allotment sites and 151 registered tenants.
We have 10 children’s play areas and 4 basketball/mini soccer courts. We spend around 1,100 hours each year managing and maintaining them at an annual cost of around £17,000. This excludes any large improvement projects.
We have already created and now actively manage around 5 acres of wild flower meadow. Species diversity is improving annually.
We usually plant at least 700 trees every year. Some large and many small.
We provide flower displays in many flower beds and planters around the parish.
We investigate every single land based enquiry we receive and respond to every resident.