TONS of rubble and building waste has been dumped in a nature park’s play area.
Richard Walker, who has spent the last 20 years nurturing the park for local children and wildlife, says his beloved park has been “ruined”.
Mr Walker, known to the community of the East Yorkshire village as ‘Stitch’ has led Leven Youth Club for the last 34 years.
He was stunned when he arrived at the park’s ‘wild area’, often used for play by local children, to find it buried under soil, rubble and other building waste.
Expressing his dismay he said: “I have spent thousands of hours voluntarily building this nature reserve and play area for kids and the work of two or three hours has ruined it.”
The cause of the destruction is the development of a car park for the nearby Leven Sports Hall, with builders dumping the resultant waste in the nature reserve.
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The park is usually a haven for birds, bats and insects and is popular with the local community as an area for both play and learning.
Leven Pre-School often visit to go pond dipping, play in a mud kitchen and learn all about the natural habitat.
It has also been the venue for popular Easter egg hunts, Halloween trails and Santa’s grotto events over the years.
Thankfully, the nature reserve itself has not been damaged by the building works.
However, local hero Stitch said the wild play space beside it, where children enjoy clambering over logs, riding their bikes or playing on a giant tyre swing, has been devastated.
“I’ve been asked what I am whingeing about when it’s ‘just a bit of topsoil’ that has gone on there. I want to do more play things for the kids on there and instead they are treating it as a free tip.”
Mr. Walker said he had been asking representatives of Leven Parish Council and East Riding Council to come and look at the site but they “won’t do anything.”
He added that access to the nature park, via a pathway and a single gate, had also been blocked off by contractors and he was instead having to let visiting groups in via the double gates on the busy A165 road.
In a statement, Steven Hunt secretary of the Leven Playing Fields Association, said: “The land had become overgrown and our caretaker has had problems with nuisance behaviour there.”
He went on to explain that 40-60 tons of “predominantly topsoil” had been deposited in the wild area.
“Over the years it has not been used by the village or the children. We want to work with Mr Walker to create a new area for the children to enjoy. We would like to improve the area, put some picnic benches in there, landscape it and seed it up.”
He emphasised that his first priority was to complete the work on the car park, for which £70,000 of public funding has been sought.
He added that after the work was done he wanted to sit down with Mr Walker and discuss the best way to develop the play space next to the nature park, as well as create a proper, accessible footpath for visitors to the reserve.
Mr Hunt concluded by saying: “We are a registered charity and we run it all as volunteers. Everything we do is to try to improve facilities for the village.”
