£5,000 rewilding project at Brockenhurst railway station branded “total waste of money”

A £5,000 rewilding project at Brockenhurst railway station commemorating the late Queen has been condemned as “a total waste of money”.

New Forest Community Railway Partnership spent the cash from Cross Country Rail turning a grass bank opposite the main ticket office at the station into what should have been an oasis of nature, providing flowers for bees and habitats for other insects.

But three years the “Elizabethan Garden” is just a dry, brown scrubland, with no flowers visible at all when the A&T paid a visit last week.

David Bennett, former chair of Friends of Brockenhurst Railway Station, said: “It looks awful and is one of the first things people visiting by train get to see of the village.

“The Friends first suggested a rewilding of that site, but the project was taken over by the New Forest Community Rail Partnership and £5,000 was spent on it. The first year there was nothing, nothing the second year either, and now it looks like this.

“It is such a shame. There are rewilding places in other parts of the New Forest such as New Milton which look fantastic, with poppies and all sorts of plants growing in them. From day one these have been visual triumphs – ours is just mess.”

Mr Bennett says he believes the project has not been “properly managed”, adding: “It doesn’t appear to have been cared for properly at all. A lot of concrete and rubble was left at the site, with earth just a few inches thick over it, and plants have failed to take root there.

“Nothing seems to have been done to maintain the area. Last week the grass was knee height and this week it has been strimmed.”

The Lymington-Brockenhurst Community Rail Partnership (LB CRP), now known as the New Forest Community Rail Partnership, was launched in 2008. It’s partnership stakeholders are South Western Railways, Hampshire County Council, New Forest District Council, New Forest National Park Authority, and Brockenhurst Parish Council.

This week Bobby Lock, community rail manager with the partnership, claimed the rewilding project had not flowered so far due to a combination of bad weather and the fact that Southern Rail had strimmed the site twice.

She and Cllr Jacqui England also said that the Friends of Brockenhurst Railway Station had offered to maintain the site when it was first planted, but had “failed to do so”.

Ms Lock said: “We agreed to obtain funding for the project and worked hard to do so.

“The garden was planted in June 2022, but a hot summer resulted in little growth. The following year was, again, a poor year for weather, and when it did grow South Western Railway strimmed it.

“This year, which has been very wet, it did start to grow, but National Rail cut a 30ft diseased tree down at the back of the area, taking two days.

“When a contractor visited the site he informed us it was ‘decimated’ and covered in sawdust, which when rained upon turned to mulch.

“We believe that the wildflowers will grow and it will look beautiful.”

Peter Wales, chairman of Brockenhurst Parish Council, said in a statement: “My understanding is that the project will take a few years, with late blooms in the first year and some parts flowering well in the second.

"Whilst there appears to have been little flowering this year the visual effect has been spoilt due to essential work removing a tree with ash dieback.

“The area was strimmed this week, with the arisings and seeds hopefully to be part of next year's growth."