MAKE OUR TREES COUNT - Count the trees to save the woods of Camberwell Old Cemetery, London as a Nature Reserve

 

This Earth Day, Sunday 22 April 2018

Meet 2.00pm at the Main Entrance Gates

Camberwell Old Cemetery, East Dulwich

Forest Hill Road SE22 0RR

 

 

What is happening?

 

Southwark Council is in the process of clearing 12 acres of woods in Council-owned Camberwell Old Cemetery in East Dulwich. Two acres have already been cleared. Ten acres remain to be saved.

 

The Event

 

On Earth Day Sunday 22 April, The Save Southwark Woods campaign will count, measure and record trees in the remaining 10 acres.

 

Guy Mannes-Abbot will be helping with the CAVAT Assessment process, the one he and residents used to survey the trees on the Heygate Estate, proving their immense value and saving hundreds from the axe.

 

We will show the true economic value of the woods - assets that Southwark is knowingly destroying, for burial plots in clay over and in the graves of the dead.

 

And we will show the scale and beauty of what we are about to lose.

 

Why are these woods so valuable?

 

These ten acres of native broadleaf woodland are a rare, natural jewel in the South London Green Chain, havens for wildlife and people created over decades of benign neglect like Highgate and Nunhead Cemeteries.

 

They are a registered Grade 1 Site of Importance for Nature Conservation (SINC), with species including oak, ash, lime, sycamore, hawthorn and holly, and animals such as bats, owls, butterflies, and bees.

 

The Save Southwark Woods Campaign

 

Residents have been calling on Southwark for four years to stop the destruction and protect Camberwell Old Cemetery woods as a Nature Reserve. We hadn’t recorded the number and type of trees in the two acres that Southwark cleared 2016. They claimed only 11 trees were cut down when we count hundreds of stumps. We won’t make this mistake again.

 

The Council

 

Labour-controlled Southwark refuses to listen. The Council removed the Woodland Tree Preservation Order and has already cut down two acres of woods.

 

Recording the economic value of our woods will mean Southwark Council can’t ignore the value of nature - whoever is elected on May 3rd.

 

 

 

Urgent: Make Our Woods Count - Count Our Trees

 

Meet 2pm Sunday 22nd April Camberwell Old Cemetery Gates and help us show the value of our woods.

 

RSVP to let us know you can help:

[email protected]

 

More information on the Save Southwark Woods Campaign by the Friends of the Camberwell Cemeteries:

www.savesouthwarkwoods.org.uk

 

Contact:

 

Blanche Cameron

07731304966

 

Lewis Schaffer

07886504221