The Pond Restoration Project

From June 24, 2025, the Friends of Hillside Gardens and Palace Road Nature Garden are working to replace the old pond and dipping platform in the Nature Garden. The project is led by Nick Peacock. The key problem is that the old liner of the pain failed. The new ponds will have waterproof liners to retain rainwater and, as there will be several smaller ponds, if one becomes damaged or otherwise fails, it will be easier to repair, and the other ponds will allow the wildlife refuge.

Funding

The project is funded by The Nature Hubs Fund (supported by Hubbub and Starbucks UK) and Froglife.

Join the Project

The Starting Point

Here are pictures from September 2023, when clearance work first started as the Gardening Group, led by Tom Stanbury, worked through Saturday mornings in the autumn. In the middle and on the right, you can see how it looked a couple of weeks later. We now have hedgerow trees planted along some of this section.

Below, you see pictures of the pond at the beginning of 2025, the starting point of the project, and our motivation to improve it. One of the biggest problems is that the pond had very little water. The failed pond lining is the fundamental issue in retaining the rainfall that does come. Hence, Nick applied for funding for the restoration work.

Starbucks Volunteering Day (24th June, 2025)

We were joined by 12 volunteers from Starbucks, one of our funding partners for the pond project. Tasks undertaken include vegetation clearance, litter picking, scything, nature spotting, sign painting, bench refurbishment and stag beetle loggery building. Thank you so much to Dylan and Rose from Froglife, Tom and Mered for your time and energy, and thank you to Tash, Krystian, Eleanor and LV for coming along and helping! The hard work really begins on Tuesday, 8th July, I hope to see many of you then!

Below, you can see in “before-and-after” pictures what the volunteers achieved, cleaning out the whole area around the pond.