The degradation of the St Matthews estate

This is my personal experience of living on the St Matthews Estate and how I see what has happened over the last few years.

7 years ago St Matthews had an incredibly wide selection of bushes and trees with its attendant wildlife of Bats, Hedgehogs,Songbirds,Birds of Prey,and Insects.

Now most of the above are gone. I hardly saw a bee or a butterfly on the estate this whole summer.

Over the years the bushes in the communal areas have been gradually removed, in some cases replaced with non indigenous plants like yukka but mostly just removed. Trees have been cropped and cut to facilitate security cameras, the trees around the old school have been felled, and numerous trees have been removed to build car parking spaces.

Last year the local park was redone at a cost of £85000. Yes you guessed it trees were removed and the local police requested the bushes should be under 1 foot in height to prevent drug dealing. They needn't have worried because the maintenance teams promptly sprayed the park a couple of months later with herbicide killing a lot of the new planting.

St Georges roundabout which borders the estate had a lot of trees in the middle of it which were removed completely again on the grounds of drug dealing. I put in a FOI (Freedom of Information) request to Leicestershire police asking them how many arrests they had made on the roundabout in the last five years and yes there was not one.

The policy of the council towards the estate in terms of environment is totally negligent. Cost of Maintenance is the primary driver of the policy. As the estate is in the city centre every single green leaf contributes to the quality of the air we breathe but I would estimate that 50% of the trees and plants have been removed in the last 7 years. At this rate it wont be long before we are living in a car park that looks as neat as an architects drawing.

I do not think that this is what we should be building for our children to grow up in. In this era of climate change surely there should be a concerted effort to plant more trees on the estate both for immediate environmental improvement and long term rehabilitation of our flora and fauna.

I am pretty good at finding things out but in this case I need your help. I want to find out who orders the herbicide and what is the long term policy for its use. It is pretty stupid to spray all the meadow plants growing at the edges of the estate and then tell us to look after the bees.

That is why I have called this campaign "Who ordered Agent Orange?"

I would like anybody in Leicester to give me two minutes of you time and join my Facebook group which will present a petition to the council asking these very questions. I really need your support in this as the council will not listen to to just one person. If there are 20,000 of us then it is a different question.

Thank you for reading this far and I hope you will support my petition. Please feel free to comment although I will be moderating them.