Green heritage and wellbeing workshop

Barbara Silva & Joshua Smith (Natural England)

Green space plays a vital role in health and wellbeing, supporting physical activity, improving mental health, fostering social connections, and enhancing resilience to climate impacts. This talk explores how Natural England’s 2025–2030 strategy places wellbeing at the heart of Nature recovery, with the ambition to “build nature into everyday life so people can support, access and benefit from nature, wherever they live.” Central to this approach is a strong emphasis on science, as set out in Natural England’s Science, Evidence and Analysis Framework (2025), ensuring that policy and practice are powered by science.

The talk outlines how improved data and evaluation are being used to better understand who benefits from green space, identify gaps in access, and address inequalities. It highlights a growing focus on evidence-led planning, nature-based solutions, and partnership working, demonstrating how greener places can support healthier lives while contributing to a thriving natural environment.

Linda Monckton (Historic England)

As an arms-length body Historic England works with the wider natural and heritage sectors and government to consider protection of historic parks and gardens and other outdoor spaces; it also promotes the values for societal wellbeing that are possible if they are protected. This brief paper will outline some of the key issues in parts of the historic environment such as parks and gardens. It will look at the research context for historic outdoor spaces and wellbeing and provide information on current strategic issues.

Ho-Chung Tam (University of Birmingham)

Research on nature and human wellbeing has focused predominantly on biodiversity and green or blue environments, while geodiversity, the abiotic components of nature such as geological features and landforms, remains underexplored. This limits its consideration within conservation and environmental policy.

This systematic review synthesises empirical evidence on geodiversity-wellbeing relationships in the UK. Following PRISMA guidelines, nine databases were searched using the SPIDER framework. Studies were appraised using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool and synthesised thematically. Four studies met the inclusion criteria, primarily in coastal contexts.

Findings suggest that engagement with geodiversity relates to psychological restoration, nature connectedness, and developmental experiences such as confidence and autonomy. These outcomes appear to emerge through active interaction with geological materials and the spatial qualities of landscapes.

Although limited, the evidence highlights geodiversity as a potentially important yet overlooked dimension of nature-wellbeing relationships.

Jessica Moody (University of Bristol)

How to ethically, meaningfully and appropriately represent and communicate histories of transatlantic enslavement has remained a prominent question for heritage organisations. New research as well as public history interventions in this area have successfully drawn focus from more well-established areas of engagement such as histories of abolition or maritime and port-centric narratives into newer areas such as connections between empire and colonialism, and the British countryside, especially through entanglements with country house estates. Alongside a now established and increasingly popular understanding of the benefits of ‘green social prescribing’ for health and wellbeing, as well as the fact that many more people will visit the grounds and gardens of country houses than enter buildings, what potential might there be for communicating potentially difficult histories of enslavement in green heritage spaces?

How might such green spaces, many of which remain undeveloped in terms of historical interpretation, become productive spaces of public history, able to communicate

complex pasts in new ways, through what I am terming a ‘plant public history’? How might we cultivate care in this practice and foreground processes of healing? This talk emerges from the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship Plants, Enslavement and Public History: Re-imagining green spaces as places of heritage and healing.

Faye Sayer (University of Birmingham)

This paper discusses the impact of Winterbourne House and Gardens, Botanical Heritage and Indian Textile Project on participants wellbeing. The practical, community-based workshops invited Sikh women from Walsall to experiment with embroidery, block printing, share examples of their own textile work, and explore connections between William Morris designs at Winterbourne and Indian textile traditions. The workshops drew on Winterbourne’s living plant collections and pressed herbarium specimens as design stimuli. Participants ranged from those rekindling textile skills first developed in India to complete beginners, enabling intergenerational exchange within the Sikh community. Drawing on pre- and post-participation surveys, the project indicated that engagement in creative heritage activity based around green spaces and botanical collections produced measurable gains in social and personal wellbeing. We argue that this pilot demonstrates the value of green space and place-based making for wellbeing, for surfacing diasporic textile knowledge, and for developing more inclusive approaches to heritage curation.

Jen Ridding & Rachel Gillies (Birmingham Botanical Gardens)

Birmingham Botanical Gardens is a Victorian botanic garden, with a global plant collection, which is reinventing itself for the 21st century. In our super-diverse urban context community, cultural heritage and wellbeing are central to this reinvention.

Over the past four years we have worked with audiences, communities and stakeholders to create a road map for the future of the Gardens. This includes delivery of a transformational £19.45m capital project Growing our Green Heritage to restore, redisplay and reinterpret the heritage and collection, and reposition the Gardens as a connected, responsive and valued civic institution in the city.

Informing this journey lies our central provocation- what is the role of a 21st century urban Botanic Garden, located within the super diverse and youthful city of Birmingham, within the contexts of severe biodiversity loss, climate crisis and political uncertainty?

This presentation will discuss Birmingham Botanic Gardens’ journey so far, considering how we are changing perceptions, tackling barriers to engagement and building mutually beneficial partnerships. We’ll share action research case studies including recent programmes in health and wellbeing, archives and heritage, and accessibility and inclusion, all designed to share, activate and rethink the Gardens’ social value and purpose in the 21st century.

Holly Winter-Hughes (University of Birmingham)

This presentation explores how overlooked forms of urban nature—such as weeds, moss and wildflowers growing through cracks—contribute to creative health and everyday wellbeing. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and personal accounts, it examines how these small, often dismissed presences become anchors for memory, storytelling, noticing and emotional connection within the city.

Participants describe weeds as reminders of childhood landscapes, markers of ecological change and symbols of persistence within built environments. These encounters generate forms of everyday urban folklore, where human and nonhuman lives are entangled through narrative, affect and attention. In this way, micro-landscapes function not simply as ecological features, but as sites of informal, creative health practices that support reflection, connection and belonging.

By focusing on the ordinary and overlooked, this research reframes urban green spaces as dispersed and intimate infrastructures of care. It suggests that attending to these small-scale encounters can expand understandings of green heritage and inform more inclusive, place-based approaches to urban wellbeing.