Clean sweep for grot spot

Published by Riverside for Riverside in Communities and also in Housing

Riverside’s Your Place team has cleaned up a notorious Kirkdale grot spot as part of the North Liverpool Show Your Beautiful Face campaign

The housing association made a pledge at the launch of the campaign - which aims to tackle some of the biggest challenges in some of the city’s most hard-up wards – to address the overgrown garden on James Hopkins Way that had become a source of complaints from residents in the surrounding area.

The Your Place environmental wardens, who were cited as an example of best practice at the Merseyside Environment Awards, carried out the improvement works.

Riverside’s Assistant Neighbourhood Services Manager Robbie Williams said: “The launch of Show Your Beautiful Face at Isla Gladstone in June was not just an all talk and no action publicity stunt. We made a pledge to tackle a notorious grot spot and we have delivered on that promise. 

“The site had been an eyesore for years. It was overgrown with weeds and had become a dumping ground for fly-tipping and as a result it was attracting rats. Now we have paved the site, it not only looks much better but is easier to maintain.”

Notes to editors:

Your Place is a coordinated programme of neighbourhood services Merseyside aimed at making neighbourhoods cleaner, greener and safer. The team deliver environmental improvements and neighbourhood warden services. These have been designed to combat what our tenants and residents told us concerns them the most about their neighbourhood. This allows us to deal with the day to day estate issues that need to be actioned straight away. The team was recently named runner-up in the Neighbourhood Improvement category of the Merseyside Environment Awards.

Show Your Beautiful Face aims to celebrate and promote North Liverpool as a place in which to live, work and invest - now and in the future. It brings together around 40 public, voluntary and private sector organisations that want to use their existing staff and resources to do things differently in order to deliver real and sustainable change on the ground in and around Anfield, Everton, Walton and Kirkdale. It is about a smarter, more responsive and more joined up approach to delivering services and solving problems. It's about working collaboratively, thinking creatively and acting courageously. It's also about dealing effectively with the small things whilst being able to seize the big opportunities. It's about changing perceptions and transforming realities. It's about affirming the importance of North Liverpool to the life of the city, by revealing the unrealised potential and unrecognised beauty of its people and places.

Riverside is one of the leading social housing and regeneration organisations in England, owning or managing around 50,000 homes with around 2,600 staff and a turnover of £257 million. Its record of achievement dates back to our inception as Liverpool Improved Houses in 1928. It provides sheltered and supported housing for elderly, homeless and vulnerable people, in addition to general needs affordable properties for rent and shared ownership. It also invests in community projects, from youth engagement schemes aimed at reducing anti-social behaviour, to credit union grants tackling financial exclusion. The organisation’s vision is transforming lives, revitalising neighbourhoods. www.riverside.org.uk