By Marian Spain, Chief Executive, Natural England
In this blog, NE Chief Executive Marian Spain reflects on her visit to Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP), alongside senior leaders from The National Lottery Heritage Fund and the National Trust, to see firsthand the amazing benefits of the Nature Towns and Cities programme.
What makes a great place to live? Increasingly, the answer includes easy access to nature. In Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP), residents benefit from an extensive network of parks, green spaces and coastal habitats; spaces that support health, wellbeing and community life, and help people connect with nature close to home.
But what does it really take to make that happen at scale, and to sustain it? That was the question in my mind this week when I joined Eilish McGuinness, Chief Executive of the National Lottery Heritage Fund, and Hilary McGrady, Director General of the National Trust, the founding partners of Nature Towns and Cities to visit BCP Council and see firsthand what becomes possible when local ambition meets national partnership.
A national leader for urban nature
In 2025, BCP became the first place to receive official Nature Towns accreditation. This recognition reflects more than a decade of work embedding nature into planning, public health, climate resilience, and community life, with results to show for it. It goes far beyond planting trees or maintaining parks.
Since 2023, BCP Council and its local partners have gone further still, helping to shape the Nature Towns and Cities programme at a national level, acting as pioneer and mentor to urban areas across the country.
Transforming parks and communities
Across a population of 409,000, BCP and its partners are delivering an ambitious green transformation. The council is upgrading fourteen urban parks into multi-functional community hubs, blending nature-friendly planting with community cafes and volunteering opportunities. The BCP Nature Pledge empowers residents, businesses, and schools to turn their own outdoor spaces into wildlife havens. And major landscape-scale projects including the Stour Valley Park and Littletown Greenway now connect fragmented green corridors across the area.
Each of BCP's parks and green spaces generates around £20 of health and wellbeing value per visit, underlining the economic as well as social case for this investment.
Nature as preventative infrastructure
BCP faces real challenges. The area has significant health and social inequalities, including a nine-year gap in male life expectancy between its most and least deprived communities. Access to green space is uneven, with canopy cover lowest in some of the borough's most disadvantaged neighbourhoods.
The council increasingly views nature not as an amenity but as preventative infrastructure, something that supports physical and mental health, reduces inequalities, and strengthens community resilience. Targeted investment in areas like West Howe and Kinson deliberately prioritises those who have historically had least access to quality green space.
A model for towns and cities everywhere
As one of England's most densely populated urban areas, BCP's success in embedding nature into a constrained urban environment carries a powerful message for towns and cities facing similar pressures around growth, climate resilience, and public health. The question BCP has answered, not just in strategy documents but on the ground, is whether genuinely nature-rich urban places are achievable at scale. The answer is clearly yes.
Urban areas across the country are now taking the approaches pioneered here and adapting them to their own contexts, demonstrating that a greener, healthier, and more resilient urban future is within reach, wherever you are.
Eilish McGuinness, Chief Executive, The National Lottery Heritage Fund, said:
"It was fantastic to discover how closely council leaders, local charities, volunteers and community champions are working together to reimagine the role of nature in people’s everyday lives. BCP are creating a Nature Towns and Cities partnership model that will lead by example UK-wide, showing how investing in green spaces can strengthen local pride, improve natural heritage and biodiversity and drive economic growth. It’s thanks to players of the National Lottery that the Heritage Fund can spearhead funding to support urban communities in their drive to save our precious natural heritage for all to enjoy."
What BCP has pioneered, towns and cities across the country are now making their own. The model is scalable, the benefits are real, and the ambition is national. Over the next decade, Nature Towns and Cities will work with one hundred urban areas across the UK so that many more communities can enjoy the healthier, greener, more resilient places they deserve.
Visit the website to find out more: Home - Nature Towns and Cities
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