Where would you find wild rabbits mixing with jogging yummy mummies and blackberry foragers? The countryside? Park land? How about a landfill site? You’d be forgiven for thinking the latter ludicrous, but that is exactly what you’ll find at Biffa’s restored landfill site in the Wirral.

The former Bromborough Dock landfill on the Wirral Peninsula opened as the Port Sunlight River Park (PSRP) in August 2014, and has seen wildlife, and people, return to this surprisingly picturesque site. Rising 37 metres above ground, and with expansive views across the Mersey to the Liverpool skyline, the 35-hectare park is providing Wirral residents with much-needed green land.

“Everyone loves parks, everyone loves green spaces, but the problem is often how to find sustainable solutions to manage them for the long term”, Gary Vyse, Communications & Marketing Officer at The Land Trust, tells me. “And that’s where The Land Trust comes in.”

The national charity, which promotes public space use for both wildlife and community benefit, approached Biffa about taking out a 99-year surface lease when the landfill reached the end of its 15-year operating life in 2006.

Despite the “complex legal and planning” arrangements, and the fact that “at one stage, the project looked to be in jeopardy” because of funding issues (according to Peter Lunt, Closed Site Manager at Biffa), ultimately, £3.4 million was found to progress the project. This included £2.3 million from the Newlands programme (using funding previously given to the North West Development Agency), along with funding from Biffa (including money from its Landfill Tax Credit Scheme, the Biffa Award), the Forestry Commission (under the England Woodland Grant Scheme), and Unilever, which also donated seven acres of land adjacent to the landfill.

With the money in place, the Land Trust used half for site restoration, with the remainder left as an endowment (with interest providing the annual management budget) to ensure that there would be sufficient funds to manage the free-to-enter site in perpetuity.

Restoration process

As soon as the legal paperwork was in place, work progressed quickly. Alison Whitehead, Development Manager at the Land Trust, tells me: “Biffa had already put an HDPE capping layer over the landfill, along with poor soil (in terms of nutrients), which is quite good for wild flowers and what we’re trying to achieve here – naturalistic wildlife habitats. So, we just had to get rid of the trip hazards, do health and safety tests, pit trials, et cetera, and then we went out for contracts.”

The first tender was for the project management and landscape architecture, which was won by Gillespies LLP. This involved evaluating the surface of the landfill, clearing bricks and other visible wastes, putting more soil down in the areas where the trees were being planted, and seeding wild flower mixes.

Whitehead elaborates: “There was some re-landscaping of levels, removal of redundant buildings and fencing, and the creation of a network of paths (there’s disabled access for the majority of the park, but some of the slopes are harder to get up), along with a few benches, signs, new fencing, a car park and bins. But a lot of it has just grown back naturally. Nature is just fantastic – it’ll just come and do what we want! In the end, we planted 17,000 trees – just around the edges of the park, because the view across to the Liverpool skyline is the thing that sells this place.”

The park’s other major contract regarded access, and a tender won by Jennings Landscape Construction saw rough track on unadopted road resurfaced, and parking bays added so that visitors wouldn’t be solely reliant on the car park inside the gates.

Following the opening of the site, the Wirral Autistic Society, which trains people with autism for work, became responsible for the upkeep of almost everything inside the gates. “The charity already had established landscaping teams across the area, and it was recommended to us by the Port Sunlight Village Trust, as it had done some work with them on their site in Brombrough”, says Whitehead. “So the service users [known as River Park Rangers] cut the grass, trim the trees back and do simple landscaping works.”

She adds that, as the charity’s landscape team is funded by other sources, Wirral Autistic Society was able to use the money saved through this contract to employ a full-time park ranger to manage the volunteers and contractors, and handle the day-to-day running of the site. Fortunately, the charity already had a ranger working for them (Anne Litherland, formerly the ranger at Birkenhead Park), and she took up the role in October 2014.

Landfill gas recovery

As with anything involving the public, one of the most crucial elements of the project was ensuring public safety. The park has added complexities as Biffa is still recovering landfill gas for energy production, and there is a Shell oil pipeline running between the landfill and the River Mersey under the Unilever land.

Lunt says: “Technically, there were many details to work through, including oil pipelines, landfill stability [the summit will eventually drop by a whopping 20 metres as material compresses], as well as the small matter of allowing the public onto a former landfill site with active gas and leachate extraction and treatment systems! But… detailed measures were implemented.”

Around 60 gas extraction wells are dotted around the site, linking to an on-site generator that produces electricity to power around 2,500 homes. These points have to be securely sealed off from the public but also kept accessible for monitoring purposes. As such, many lockable green ‘cages’ have been erected over the infrastructure to protect both the public, as well as Biffa’s investment.

Indeed, Whitehead says that one of the restoration’s biggest challenges involved designing paths that didn’t impact on Biffa’s test points, gas outlets, or the underlying oil pipeline. This was made all the more complicated by the fact that the site also has access rights across a private road that leads to a United Utilities water treatment works (which you occasionally get wafts of in some parts of the park), meaning there are frequently lorries and staff vehicles near the site’s entrance on a road that members of the public can be tempted to walk down.

But the public reaction has been enthusiastic, she tells me. “Most people have been really positive – we are next to a very deprived area, and it’s been really welcomed. We knew that there would be problems, and there has been the odd little thing – for example, we had some vandalism of the fingerposts, people using the site to strip metal [the site had been a hotspot for metal stripping before the restoration] and people letting their dogs foul all over the place – but we’re used to that, and all it takes is a little education from the volunteers and the ranger to fix that.”

On the Monday morning that I visit Port Sunlight, the site is rather quiet, but the few walkers we meet are impressed with the site’s progression and admiring of its views. One keen bird watcher has even identified that there are already more than 70 species of bird living at the site’s shallow lake!

Future vision

But the project is still evolving; work has already begun on refurbishing the old Biffa site office for the comfort of the River Park Rangers, and it is hoped that PSRP will have its own visitor reception and public toilets in the near future.

With housing and commercial developments being built on two sides of the park, there are also plans to put in place a pedestrian bridge from the coast to the park. And with the Local Government Association estimating that the UK could run out of landfill space by 2018, there will undoubtedly be many looking to The Land Trust for guidance.