What is the Green Grid

The Green Grid is an exciting long-term project to provide a green infrastructure framework for the Peterborough area.

Green infrastructure is the sub regional network of protected sites, nature reserves, green spaces, and greenway linkages. The linkages include river corridors and flood plains, migration routes and features of the landscape, which are of importance as wildlife corridors.

Green infrastructure should provide for multi-functional use e.g. wildlife, recreational and cultural experience, as well as delivering ecological services, such as flood protection and microclimate control. It should operate at all spatial scales from urban centres through to open countryside.

Town and Country Planning Association 2004 – Biodiversity by Design

In 2006 the Peterborough Green Grid Partnership commissioned The Landscape Partnership to produce a report and recommendations for a Green Grid Strategy for Peterborough, to provide a framework and action plan for green infrastructure provision throughout the Peterborough district, with links to green infrastructure in adjacent Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire.

The Green Grid Strategy has been developed as a major project with the vision of ‘making space for people, wildlife and water in a growing urban environment and its fringes so that there is an extensive, attractive, accessible and functional landscape throughout Greater Peterborough’.

The strategy brings together GIS databases of a wide range of environmental assets and it analyses these to identify gaps and opportunities in the ecological and recreational networks. It then makes a number of recommendations for priority projects in and around Peterborough under the headings of biodiversity and landscape, access and recreation, and major new green spaces.

The strategy provides a valuable resource to inform and guide planners, developers and key interest groups in the planning, implementation and management of multi-functional green infrastructure project.

Implementation of Green Grid projects will:
• create more opportunities for informal sport, leisure and recreation
• bring together communities by providing quality public spaces
• improve the local environment through sustainable transport links
• raise awareness of regionally important habitats on our doorsteps
• create new habitats for wildlife