Urban Greening News

Urban Greening at the Chelsea Fringe
April 2013

We are proud to announce our involvement in our local Edible Askew Road initiative as part of this year’s Chelsea Fringe.

The Chelsea Fringe is a festival of flowers, gardens and gardening held across London over three weeks to coincide with the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Chelsea Fringe is completely independent of the Flower Show and entirely powered by volunteers but complements the renowned show in a similar adventurous spirit to the Edinburgh Fringe.

Askew Road is literally just around the corner from our London office and we are really looking forward to helping the team with this excellent demonstration of how urban greening can benefit the community and enhance our urban environments.

Local environmental charity, the Hammersmith Community Gardens Association and residents, shops and local businesses are to turn the Askew Road into a river of fruit trees between 18th May and 9th June 2013, and be part of the Chelsea Fringe, a festival of flowers, gardens and gardening which will be held across London over three weeks to coincide with the RHS Chelsea Flower Show.

Edible Askew Road will be launched between 11 am and 2.30 pm on Saturday 18th May with much fanfare including food, pedal-powered smoothie bikes, discovery trails, and entertainers such as Albert & Friends and stilt-walkers, a BBQ at The Eagle and much more.

If you are free and live in West London, come along and enjoy the festivities, we'd love to meet you.

A big thank you to all our Ecobuild visitors

March 2013

Thanks to everyone that made the effort to come and meet us last week at Ecobuild. We had a great week and really enjoyed talking with you all, particularly how we may solve some of your environmental challenges by installing our living hoardings or screening solutions. For those who left details we will be in contact shortly to discuss next steps.

A big thank you as well to our hosts at British Precast. Our stand may have been small but the location was fabulous and the increased footfall more than made up for the need to compress our demo stand.

Come and join us at Ecobuild

February 2013

As mentioned last month we are currently finalising our stand for Ecobuild 2013 at the ExCel London. Since its launch in 2005, Ecobuild has almost doubled in size every year to become the biggest event in the world for sustainable design, construction and the built environment.

Ecobuild is the industry’s major showcase of sustainable products and materials, an unequalled opportunity to discover new suppliers and contacts. It’s also the definitive source of information about design and construction, where learning meets practical application, and puts them both alongside suppliers of products and solutions.

Rather than mix with our green wall colleagues in the South Hall we have chosen to hang out with our construction friends in the North Hall. You can find us in the Precast and Masonry Village (the supports for our hoarding are produced by a BPCF member and they were keen for some greenery around the village). Come and see our Living Hoarding display on stand N1456.

Welcome to a chilly new year

January 2013

There was a slow start to January with on-site projects delayed due to adverse weather conditions but this did give us a chance to catch up with a few office projects.

One interesting development was the launch of the government's Green Deal initiative. Opinions still seem divided on the potential benefits and take-up of the programme but we have been sticking close to a few of the organisations involved to ensure we don't miss any opportunities. We'll provide updates as we learn more. Stay tuned!

We can say we will be at Ecobuild again this year. The last few years has seen the event growing in popularity, credibility and applicability so we are keen not to miss out the chance to mix with our peers and meet with the visitors. We still need to finalise exact details on our stand but look out for us if you get a chance to visit, we’ll certainly be keen to meet with you!

Seasons Greetings

December2012

The holiday season seems to have jumped out at us this month.

We’ve been busy forming relationships with a number of businesses in the Urban Greening community and hope to be able to announce new initiatives and partnerships in the New Year. Meanwhile we’d like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

See you in January.

Out and about

November 2012

This month has seen our participation in a number of business and networking events in the construction industry. Two in particular are worth mentioning.

The first is the Construction Forum hosted by SusCon, the new sustainable construction training and research centre at The Bridge in Dartford. The 10-month pilot scheme aims to bring together local businesses working within all sectors of the construction industry. The format consists of a breakfast meeting with a opportunity to network with peers and learn from talks covering a wide range of aspects of the industry regarding legislation, innovations and best practice.

It was great to meet with the advisers behind SusCon, similar businesses to ourselves and investigate the various innovative techniques used in constructing the SusCon building. Looking to the future we are hoping to present a talk ourselves to promote the use of urban greening solutions in construction and maybe even get a chance to showcase our no-dig living hoarding system.

As part of our ongoing efforts to promote our new living hoarding system this week we attended a ‘Meet-the-Buyer’ event at London’s Heathrow airport.

The format is a little like ‘speed-dating’ for companies. 60 or so major buying companies from Heathrow’s supply chain set themselves up in booths around the venue, publishing their purchasing requirements and the type of businesses they’d like to meet. Local businesses then book 10-minute long appointments with each of the companies they want to meet.

We managed to get face-to-face meetings with 15 separate businesses throughout the day; including a number of large construction companies, a London borough, an architecture and design consulting group, an airport services supplier and Heathrow Airport Limited itself. Each meeting allowed enough time to discuss buyer requirements, promote our solutions and establish potential steps forward. A really efficient and effective way to meet potential clients and widen your customer-base. We left with a number of really good leads to follow-up and a big smile!

Thanks to the organisers BE Group and the various sponsors. We highly recommend other SMEs take advantage of similar events in their area. We will definitely be attending the next one near us.

We're here!

October 2012

After a few months finalising details on our range of urban greening solutions for construction sites (I believe the technical term is operating in ‘stealth-mode’). The new Urban Greening division of New Build Landscapes finally broke cover this week and launched our new solutions at the Kent Construction Expo in Chatham.

Helped by our friends at Hoard-It (the no-dig, on-ground hoarding experts) we were able to demonstrate how our pre-grown ivy living hoarding can be slotted neatly into their system to provide a complete no-dig, reusable living hoarding perimeter around construction sites.

Despite being rather chilly the venue was unique and well suited to the construction theme. Our stand generated lots of interest amongst both visitors and other exhibitors, with many surprised that our ivy screens were real and not artificial replicas of living hoarding.

Hopefully we can build on this successful start and continue to deliver sustainable environment solutions to the UK construction industry.