There is a lot to love about London’s parks and green spaces – they provide outdoor recreation, tranquility, contact with nature, a habitat for wildlife and other ‘ecosystem services’. This week parks across the country are being celebrated during Love Parks Week, highlighted by our photograph this week or Norwood Park, Lambeth.
Love Parks Week aims to “raise awareness of the importance of parks and green spaces, showcasing the benefits they bring and highlighting the need for continual investment and engagement” (read more here). Through events, promotions and activities, the Love Parks Week encourages people to spend time in their local park and raises awareness about their importance as green spaces and for community.
GiGL’s Open Space dataset includes lots of data about London’s parks – each open space has information about its facilities, primary land uses and any designations, such as Green Flag Award.
As with all datasets, keeping it up to date is an ongoing job and we rely on new information from boroughs, land managers and green space users to help with this process. iGiGL is GiGL’s online web-mapping of summary datasets. Here, you can see publically accessible parks and open spaces without logging in (have a go at searching for Norwood Park!). You can read short descriptions of the sites and their facilities and tell us if there’s anything to add, or change. We also need more photos of your parks to illustrate these fact sheets – you can upload these too. If you are a GiGL partner, note that you can also register and log in to iGiGL to see the full range of open space and habitat data summaries on iGiGL.
July 2014
To read other images of the week please visit the archive.