Gateway to Nature: an October update

By Dave Lewis, Director of Operations 

The most exciting development since last month’s update is that part of the site has come back to us. For the best part of a year this has been a construction site with fencing, plant and hard hats. Now the machinery is moving off and the fencing coming down, we can start our land management work before we’re then ready for visitors to use the new track and car park.  

Preparing soil  

With areas of the site handed back to us during September, we have been able to begin soil preparation ahead of seeding. If you walk past over the coming weeks it will look bare and unpromising, but we’ll have new grassland for sheep grazing, wildflower margins for nature and trees planted for shade.  

The new car park 

The linear car park is essentially built. It sits on the line of the old concrete farm track, and every bit of that broken-out concrete stayed here and was crushed and reused in the new works, alongside the subsoil that went into Bessie’s Field. Nothing left the site. 

The final finishing touches of the new car park will be done when our contractors return to site. 

The entrance onto Sires Hill 

This new vehicle new entrance (where the track meets Sires Hill) has to be built under a formal agreement with Oxfordshire County Council, but we’re waiting for the final technical and legal approvals before that work can start. Its been designed in line with the approved planning applications and updated consultancy reports, so it’s a formal technicality.  

The practical consequence is that our contractors have to step off site now to return once the approvals are in place. This does come at a cost but it’s the sensible thing to do rather than us paying a team on site to wait.  

Visiting on site in October 

Until the new entrance opens, nothing changes for anyone locally. Visitors continue to reach us through Little Wittenham and Hollow Way as they do now. When the new access does open, that traffic moves off the Hollow Way route, which has always been one of the main reasons for doing this at all. 

Over the next few weeks we’ll be getting the site ready for visitors – new wayfinding, signage, paths and grass seeding.  

The café 

Work on the café and shop is moving from drawings to a real building. We have appointed a café manager, Tami, who joins us with 25 years in hospitality, and the fit-out is now being brought together under a single contract rather than run in pieces. 

We’re in the advanced stages of planning our two-phase café launch, with a pop-up in place from the end of October until the new café opens 7 days a week in its new space in January. We are buying a good deal of the café equipment second hand, from auction and reclamation, rather than new. Partly watching how money is being spent, partly acting how a charity that cares about people and nature should.  

Thank you 

This has been a long year for the people who live closest to the works, and for everyone who walks here every day and has put up with fencing, signage and diverted paths. I am grateful for the patience, including from those of you who have told us clearly when things were going well or they weren’t. 

I will keep sharing progress as we go, alongside refreshes to our FAQs, but not long now until we’re able to open Gateway to Nature.