A nature reserve on a council estate in Hull is being hailed as a nationally important example of rewilding by showing how urban sites can become habitat hotspots.
Ecologist Richard Broughton also believes what has happened at the Noddle Hill reserve in Bransholme over the last three decades destroys recent claims that leaving land to grow wild is just a fashionable new fad for the rich.
Commentators such as Janet Street-Porter and Gardeners’ World presenter Monty Don have both criticised large-scale rewilding projects for being the exclusive domain of wealthy property owners, rich landowners or even movie stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio, who has set up a charity to promote rewilding schemes. Boris Johnson’s wife Carrie and millionaire life peer Zac Goldsmith have also championed rewilding in recent months.
Bransholme estate in Hull
Richard was brought up in Bransholme and knows what was once billed as Europe’s biggest council estate is about as far as you can get from the rewilding vanity projects of the super-rich.
First developed in the late 1960s, the estate’s original plans envisaged a population of 26,000 living in new-build council homes, including high-rise flats and prefabricated terraced housing. People moved there from Hull’s pre-war slums, swapping life near the city’s fish docks for fresh air and space on the northern edge of the city.
Noddle Hill was one of four farms demolished to make way for the new estate, but its name was revived when plans were later mapped out for a nature reserve.
Richard studied at the University of Hull while recording wildlife on the site before it officially became a nature reserve in 2011. He’s now a research ecologist at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in Oxfordshire. He said:
“I grew up in Bransholme in the 1980s and 1990s and have been keeping tabs on Noddle Hill since then. Right now, there is a great interest in sites such as this for nature restoration, rewilding and increasing woodland habitats.
“Conservation organisations and government departments are very keen to see case studies to help shape policy. So, Noddle Hill’s time has come, in this respect, as a large part of the reserve has been left to rewild itself and local people have been monitoring it and recording the wildlife. As such, it’s a rare example of a well-documented case study of how other sites might develop.”
The story of Noddle Hill
The story of Noddle Hill goes back more than three decades to when the first tentative steps were taken to turn what was classed as moderate quality agricultural land into what would eventually become Hull’s first officially recognised nature reserve. Until 1980, seven fields next to the housing estate had been grazed by cattle before being left fallow.
Then, over an eight-year period, most of the land was used to dump clay-heavy soil from construction sites around Hull. The aim was to create landscaping for future development, but the project was eventually abandoned.
The seeds of an idea to establish a nature reserve at the site instead were then planted by local residents, led at the time by local campaigner Anita Harrison who eventually became a city councillor. The council backed their plan, provided the necessary funding and support along with Natural England and the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and in 2011 Noddle Hill secured its official designation.
Now, a new study by a research team led by Richard has made the most of the site’s age, with relatively few similar academic studies having ever been done on long-term natural rewilding. Noddle Hill also provided a relatively unique habitat because of its considerable distance from any woodland where birds typically pick up tree seeds before moving them elsewhere. As a result, new trees at Noddle Hill are still few and far in between.
Even now, researchers say the prospect of a woodland developing there naturally could be decades away. As such Noddle Hill’s alternative evolution as a wild shrubland dotted with wetland ponds is likely to continue for some time yet.
Rich mosaic of habitats
The study looked at the part of the nature reserve left untouched by human hand, by excluding managed areas where trees have been planted by the council and volunteers as well as the popular fishing lake.
“We studied the major part of the reserve that has essentially had no management for about 33 years, so has rewilded itself without intervention”, explained Richard. “The upshot is that we found the site to have developed into a rich mosaic of habitats that supports lots of biodiversity.
“It’s a wildlife hotspot in the area with echoes back to how it would have been in the Middle Ages before drainage. In particular, it’s a hotspot for songbirds, such as warblers and finches, including species that are rapidly declining elsewhere, like willow warbler and linnet.”
Noddle Hill’s distinctive bird community, including a relatively high proportion of songbirds, appears to be a direct result of its natural recent evolution into what the study describes as a “mosaic of grassland, wetland and extensive shrub thickets”. The latter include a dense patchwork of thorny bramble, common hawthorn and dog rose.
Rewilding Bransholme: an authentic working-class success story
Other conservation priority species have also benefited from Noddle Hill’s unique ecosystem. Surveys at the site have confirmed great crested newts, harvest mice and no fewer than 16 species of dragonfly while pollen and nectar produced by the main shrubs during a four-month flowering season are extensively harvested by wild pollinators and domestic honeybees.
All this is happening within a few hundred yards of a sprawling council housing estate and some of the residents who helped nature start doing its own thing all those years ago. As a proud Bransholme lad, Richard believes it’s an authentic working-class success story.
“Rewilding has been accused by some commentators as being ‘just for toffs’ but the example of Noddle Hill shows that this is plain wrong. It’s involved local people from Bransholme as a grassroots initiative working in tandem with the council and with no toffs in sight!
“It’s become a resource for the community, but it also has wider meaning by helping to show how nature can be restored in different circumstances in other parts of the country. In effect, Noddle Hill is decades ahead of many other restoration or rewilding projects, so they can learn from it.”
