Preserving our green spaces

Rather than building on our greens we believe Eastleigh Borough should offer financial rewards for any local community who comes up with a design to enhance their green space. Children and young people should be involved and begin to take pride in and ownership of their local area. Local groups might work together to design a garden, create an allotment, build an adventure playground, install a sculpture or a stone table tennis table or a wall for hitting tennis balls and kicking footballs against. They may prefer to restore an old boat for children to clamber over and play games in. It could be a tank or a plane or an old truck or a gipsy caravan ( not scrap rubbish but something attractive). Teenagers may grow attached to the feature as a place to chill, and if there were a number of these features around our estates it might help to keep young people in their local areas rather than roaming around in gangs. Of course it may not work, but "nothing ventured, nothing gained" as my Father used to say..

I came across a great idea tonight. We should make more of our roundabouts! Many French ones are really nicely presented, often with pieces of sculpture or a boat and fishing nets or something characteristically local on it. Why don't Eastleigh do the same? We could rent out the space to firms prepared to put some interesting feature on the island with some discrete advertising. Currently we have just one really good island -the Spitfire roundabout with Eastleigh's own Spitfire aircraft on it. Why don't we have more of these sorts of pride generating symbols around the town?

P.S. Has anyone got a decent picture of the Spitfire roundabout for this blog?