Northern Roots aims to actively preserve and enhance the biodiversity and ecology of the site, while minimizing our environmental impact by producing green energy, capturing carbon and championing local food production.
Stretching from Alexandra Park, past Park Bridge and the River Medlock to Daisy Nook Country Park and Ashton-under-Lyne, the 160-acre Northern Roots site is an important wildlife corridor. Two thirds of the site is forested. Habitats range from mixed deciduous and plantation forest to regionally important heathland, diverse grassland, wetland and freshwater. The southern part of the site, along the banks of the River Medlock, encompasses Bankfield Clough, which is a Site of Biological Importance due to its acidic birch-oak woodland and its grasslands.
Historically, the Northern Roots site has housed two coal mines, two cotton mills, an industrial railway, a large, combined sewage outlet tank and the council rubbish tip. Around a third of the site is former landfill and highly contaminated. Regenerating this beautiful but degraded peri-urban landscape is central to the Northern Roots project.
Northern Roots is harnessing regenerative land practices to enhance the woodland, soil, grassland and wetland. These techniques aid nature recovery, boost biodiversity, capture carbon, improve soil health and air quality, and reduce flood risk through the Medlock Valley. Overall, we seek to enhance the biodiversity of Northern Roots by 25%.
For example, managing the health and diversification of the woodland on site is crucial to increasing biodiversity, capturing carbon and enhancing air quality. In the past two years Northern Roots has sensitively thinned out areas of woodland with high concentrations of self-seeded saplings, opening up the tree canopy to enable light to reach the woodland floor. This enables many more native plants and birds to flourish.
We have planted over 50 fruit, nut and oak trees and a mile and a half of native hedgerow, providing new habitat for small mammals, birds and insects. In time we will plant many more orchard trees and hedgerows. Trees and hedges lock up carbon in their roots, trunks and branches. Good woodland management is vital to maximising the amount of carbon dioxide that the site’s woodlands can capture in the crucial period between now and 2050.
Unfortunately, we cannot stop ash dieback disease which is advancing rapidly in Britain. As our ash trees die, their contribution to carbon sequestration will drop away. However, we are creating a closed timber cycle, retaining all timber felled at Northern Roots for re-use on site. Trees that are either diseased or deemed hazardous are pollarded, dead wooded or felled and the timber is milled to teach green woodworking skills to the local community.
About 60 acres of land on the Northern Roots site was subject to landfilling from the 1960s to the late 1980s. Whilst the site has been restored and is safe for public use, if you tried to dig a hole in these areas, your spade would soon bang on layers of rubble. These areas have little topsoil and, therefore, do not lock up much carbon.
This gives us a great opportunity to nurture carbon rich grasslands. Incorporating green waste compost into the existing thin topsoils will increase soil depth and create an environment for earthworms and soil-dwelling invertebrates to thrive and re-build healthy soils, which in turn will capture more carbon. We’ve calculated that if we import green waste compost and seed the former landfill areas with wildflower grasslands, we will increase the population of earthworms in these areas by 86 million.
Northern Roots is a natural valley, channeling water from Oldham town centre down to the River Medlock. As we bring the site under active management, we will integrate a variety of sustainable urban drainage (SUDs) features to slow the flow of water through the site and improve its quality. This will include the use of permeable surfaces on paths and parking spaces to allow water to soak through, and a network of ditches and swales to capture water running off hard surfaces, and convey it to a series of leaky dams, retention ponds and reed beds.
These SUDs features help to reduce flood risk further downstream, retain water where it’s needed, including for irrigation, and create new freshwater habitats for wildlife. Additionally, several existing ponds have been restored on the Northern Roots site, and three new ponds have been created as part of a Greater Manchester Ecology Unit project to provide new habitats for the endangered Great Crested Newt. Northern Roots is also a member of the Medlock Valley Nature Partnership which is working to improve the condition of the river and its environs for nature and local residents.
Northern Roots is working with Lancashire Wildlife Trust, City of Trees, The Environment Agency, Canal and Rivers Trust, the Greater Manchester Ecology Unit, Natural England and The Conservation Volunteers to deliver these improvements, create new corridors for pollinators and wildlife, and ultimately ensure that Northern Roots becomes part of one of the newly designated Nature Recovery Networks.