A heritage project to research the green and open spaces of North Cleethorpes and get the community out visiting them
When? 2020
Funded by: National Lottery Heritage Fund
Visitors to Cleethorpes quickly discover major green spaces such as Pier Gardens or Kingsway Gardens. But local residents realise that there are so many green, open spaces across the area. There’s Sidney Park opened in 1904 and Cleethorpes Country Park opened in 1996. But there are other green spaces large and small across the area.
In 2020 Big Local North Cleethorpes was recovering from covid and so was the North Cleethorpes community. VANEL managed to secure a Heritage grant from the National Lottery so that we could a) do some in-depth research into the green spaces history of Cleethorpes, and b) we could create a ‘route’ around North Cleethorpes in particular to get residents up and out and about exploring and enjoying the fresh air and their local area.
What was the project?
We did research and involved a number of local volunteers to help with this. We explored old maps and records and gained a huge collection of postcards at the same time!
We produced a website.
Importantly, we produced a printed, fold out map which not only guides people around the North Cleethorpes area but also explains a lot of the heritage of the places they visit.
We produced online route maps at the time using popular route tracking tools.
We learned a lot about the history of the green spaces on our doorstep.
Whilst we explored the major parks such as Sidney Park and Sussex Recreation Ground, we also looked at some of the very smallest green spaces in the area – including roundabouts!
The project connected to many of our Big Local themes and agendas – environment, health – people getting out and about, youth – young volunteers helped with the research, heritage, green spaces – the Big Local ‘palm trees’ and Issacs Hill roundabout decoration featured in our green research too.
The map
An interesting issue at the time of the project was the closure of the Suggitts Lane railway crossing. This effectively cut the North Cleethorpes area in two and meant that our ‘route’ around the area had to take long diversions and had to be marked on our map as such. More recently (2023 onwards) people using the map can take more direct routes.
Conclusions
This project was not a direct investment from Big Local North Cleethorpes but Big Local was a very active contributor to the research and provided meeting spaces and other facilities to the project.
Residents of North Cleethorpes benefitted both from the research done at the time but also from the opportunity to get out and explore their own area. We met people during the course of the project who lived in the area but didn’t know about some of the places we were discovering or didn’t know their history.
Whilst the Green Route / Green Cleethorpes website remains live it can be found at https://vanel.org.uk/greencleethorpes