At a meeting on Thursday, 11 December the Greater Norwich Growth Board (GNGB) agreed to recommend to Broadland District, South Norfolk and Norwich City Councils funding of £260,899 for a new UEA Boardwalk. A final decision on the funding should be made by the councils by March 2026.
The funds are from the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL), which is a charge made on developers to finance improvements in local infrastructure and community facilities.
December Dip near old Boardwalk. Alternative route? Photo: Hilary Hann
The new boardwalk beside the River Yare will restore a key link to the popular Yare Valley Walk, and greatly increase opportunities to enjoy, appreciate, and understand the green space of the river valley and its wildlife.
Please write now to your MP to give your strong support to the Lord’s amendments to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill 94 and 130 due for imminent consideration.
The Green Infrastructure Corridor provided by the Yare Valley on the edge of South Norwich has important roles in promoting wildlife, limiting and combatting climate change, and as being a place for informal recreation for Norwich residents and beyond. Both of these amendments are importance to safeguard the well-being and continued existence of the Corridor.
The river Yare is one of the globally rare chalk streams capable of sustaining a rich and varied wildlife. Amendment 94 should help to safeguard these precious chalk streams, a responsibility we as individuals, but also as a nation, have towards the retaining this character of wildlife habitat in the world.
Amendment 130 should help to safeguard the Valley’s wildflower meadows and woodlands. Much work has been done in the Valley to improve both in recent years, thanks to the efforts of many volunteers including those with Yare Valley Meadow Makers, the Norwich Fringe Project, the Conservation Volunteers, and, joined most recently, by the UEA Biodiversity Heroes. This effort and goodwill in enhancing the Valley must not be threatened by development that does not properly recognise the value of green space for maintaining human and wildlife well-being.
Either email your MP directly of make use of the Wildlife Trusts website to forward your email.
The award winning Yare Valley Meadow Makers plan two work parties to continue to improve the UEA meadows. Volunteers will use mattocks to create patches of bare earth for sowing wildflower seed. All are welcome to come along and give their support. The work parties will take place on
Sat, Oct 25 at 2-4 PM and Sun, Nov 2 at 10-12 AM
Meet on the UEA meadows by the ziggurat sculpture, WWW///erase.slice.fingernails.
The usual full programme of volunteering opportunities. Please note the booking arrangements in the programme if you wish to have a place in the Minibus.
No venues in the Valley as such, but close by there will be meadow raking at Cringleford Community Woods on the 10th and hedge trimming to improve bird habitat at Eaton Burial Ground on the 13th.
The University of East Anglia (UEA), like many universities has been facing serious financial restraints on their spending, and so when the UEA boardwalk needed replacing the university was unable to do this from its own funds. Recognising the importance of the boardwalk to the local community, UEA has provided instead strong staffing support to seek funds from elsewhere, including the Greater Norwich Growth Board and the National Lottery. At a meeting with the Yare Valley Society on Wednesday 28th August, ways in which bids can be carried forward with YVS, and other voluntary organisations, were explored.
No go section of Yare Valley Walk necessitates detour
The UEA team and the Yare Valley Society sends a big thank you for the generous donations and support, and UEA has issued an update on the progress made so far. If you have not already done so, there is still time to make your donation. It is pleasing to report that the amount of £1800 raised quoted in the update is already out of date. It is now well over £2000, please keep it rising. Being able to show strong community is essential if bids are to be successful.
Please donate online at www.uea.ac.uk/dare-to-do-different. Or, to discuss your gift, please get in touch with the Development, Alumni and Campaigns Office.
Please help YVS to safeguard the Valley by responding to a consultation on the likely impact of installing pylons, solar panels, and other energy developments in the Yare Valley.
Pylons on Marston Marsh?
The Background
South Norfolk District Council is consulting on a draft Supplementary Planning Document (SPD) which deals with Landscape Susceptibility in relation to Energy Generation, Storage and Transmission as it relates to Local Character Areas* (LCAs) within its boundaries. It has drafted assessments of how susceptible the LCAs are to the development of solar photovoltaic panels, anaerobic digestion (AD) plants, battery storage facilities, overhead powerlines including 400kV lines that utilise the largest pylons (35-50m), underground cable routes, and substations. Among the LCAs assessed is LCA F1: Yare Valley Urban Fringe which is a part of South Norfolk that lies in the Yare Valley on the south side of the Norwich boundary (the river is the boundary).
The Yare Valley Society is concerned that the present draft susceptibility assessment in the consultation does not take fully into account the special circumstances of LCA F1. It is unique amongst the LCAs of South Norfolk, lying as it does in an urban fringe and forming part of the larger Yare Valley Green Infrastructure Corridor.
YVS is pressing for LCA F1 to have a special status and be included in the main body of the report under its own separate section. The YVS case for special status is here.
For a second submission to South Norfolk Council, YVS is preparing a detailed response to Appendix 3 Landscape Susceptibility Analysis of F1 (Pages 76 to 85). You might like to have a look at this and send in your comments to Planning at South Norfolk (email above).
Thank you for caring for the Valley
*Local Character Area status provides a degree of protection from inappropriate development. In the case of the Yare Valley LCA this is reflected in Policy DM 4.5 Landscape Character and River Valleys: “All development should respect, conserve and where possible, enhance the landscape character of its immediate and wider environment. Development proposals that would cause significant adverse impact on the distinctive landscape characteristics of an area will be refused. …”
Some welcome news on the UEA Boardwalk. Norwich City Council have agreed to sponsor the UEA application to the Greater Norwich Growth Board (GNGB) for a grant to replace and improve the UEA Yare Valley Boardwalk. If the UEA application to the GNGB is successful, the funding could become available from April 2026.
Part of the unsafe existing boardwalk Photo:UEA
To avoid the bird nesting season, which spans March to September, work to remove the old boardwalk and replace it with the new one will not take place until October 2026. In the meantime, when possible, the UEA grounds team will clear vegetation and cut back along the pathways to make the project easier for when it finally gets underway.
If you have not already done so there is still time to show community support for replacing the Boardwalk by donating to the UEA fund: under “Our Causes” be sure to select “Restore our Boardwalk”.
Matt Tomlinson of the Yare Valley Meadow Makers invites you to join the Meadow Makers work party on Marston Marsh to collect yellow rattle seed. This is becoming an annual event. The rattle seed will be used to promote wildflower growth on the Strawberry Field and UEA meadows.
Yellow rattle features on UEA Meadows interpretation board
Yellow rattle (Rhinanthus minor) is semi parasitic and feeds on the nutrients in the roots of adjacent grasses. In this way it suppresses the grass growth and creates more space for wildflowers to flourish.
There will be an evening session on Thursday 17th of July 7-9pm and an afternoon session on Saturday 26th of July 2-4pm.
All are welcome. Meet at MARSTON MARSH at ///found.maker.rocky (Marsh entrance near where the golf course crosses Marston Lane)
“The so-called Nature Recovery part of the Bill is a Trojan horse – it’s a misnomer because, in reality, it is a licence to destroy. It replaces vital nature protections with a weaker substitute, … [and so] … it puts irreplaceable habitats and threatened species at risk.”
Craig is not alone, Beccy Speight, RSPB chief executive, says:
“… the Bill in its current form will rip the heart out of environmental protections and risks sending nature further into freefall. … The evidence clearly shows nature isn’t a blocker to growth. The government has identified the wrong obstacle to the problem it’s trying to overcome, and that has led it to the wrong solutions.”
Even the government’s own body, the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP), has warned that the Planning & Infrastructure Bill will cause “environmental regression”.
The Yare Valley Society believes the Planning & Infrastructure Bill threatens the community’s ability to protect the green space corridor of the Yare Valley. The Bill weakens the present requirement that a development should deliver a “net biodiversity gain”. It allows developers of small and medium developments (the majority) to transfer measures to mitigate environmental damage away from the development site to elsewhere. This means it reduces the likelihood of new developments near the Valley having green spaces that could serve as stepping stones, to link the corridor with the wider green ecology network. One final aspect is that it reduces the protections to globally rare chalk streams, of which the River Yare is one.
Beside the river Yare – a globally rare Chalk Stream Photo: John Elbro
Go to the Wildlife Trusts website to do this easily. It strengthens your message if you can tell your MP why Green Space and Wildlife are important to you personally, ideally by mentioning the Yare Valley.
In common with many UK universities UEA have been grappling with budgetary challenges and are not able to provide the cost of a replacement boardwalk. Instead UEA is making its contribution towards a replacement by providing the services of its staff to seek funding from other sources.
UEA ‘s success in securing funding for the cost of the design of the boardwalk has already been announced. A fully costed design is a necessary first step in preparing a bid for further funding to finance the removal of the old boardwalk and the construction of the new.
At the recent UEA meetings with the Yare Valley Society and other stakeholders on the design of the boardwalk, there seemed to be a general consensus on many of the features the design might include viz.:
Follow roughly the same route as the existing boardwalk
Be about 1.2 m wide with some wider passing places
Be wheelchair friendly
Be constructed of recycled plastic for longevity and low maintenance
Have a reliable non-slip surface -not chicken wiring
Other features raised in the discussions included signposting and the provision of dog poo bins.
How you can help
The UEA is calling upon local communities to show their commitment to replacing the boardwalk by raising an initial amount of £2 000. This will enable UEA to seek further construction monies from various funding sources.
