Community, sustainability and fun!
We’re a group of Southbank (York) residents who aim to raise awareness of sustainability issues, through various activities and projects, all of which have an element of sociability and fun!
Planet Southbank began in 2011 from out of the York Green Neighbourhood Challenge, a pilot project undertaken by the Stockholm Environment Institute with the support of the City of York Council and partners, with the aim of helping householders to reduce their carbon footprints. When the project finished, the two winning teams, from Bishopthorpe Road and the Scarcroft area, came together to form the nucleus of a new, independent group, Planet South Bank.
The group is open to anyone living in the broadly defined ‘greater South Bank’ area covering the area East to West between Bishopthorpe Road and Tadcaster Road and North to South between the city walls and the former Terry’s site.
Planet Southbank was initially funded by the pooled prize money that the Bishopthorpe Road and Scarcroft teams received from the York Green Neighbourhood Challenge, but we now raise funds through our own events.
What we’ve done so far…
We launched a ‘Green Christmas’ campaign and had information stalls. In a stall on Bishopthorpe Road, we displayed a giant ‘apple-pie chart’ showing the average emissions of York residents and gave away slices of pie (made with locally harvested apples, from Abundance) and gingerbread ‘carbon’ footprints. The community garden and community composting scheme in the grounds of St Clements church (YO23 1NE; junction of Scarcroft Road and Nunthorpe Road) is now well established, with grateful thanks to our partnership with St Clements and originally with Abundance) – join our drop-in fortnightly gardening sessions each Spring-Autumn. We also held a stall at a Clements Hall open day. We’ve also had a community carol singing session on Bishopthorpe Road, and three scarecrow trails, and we run a regular Street Recycle (twice a year) and Crafty-Crawl.
Planet South Bank 
Though I cannot see it now, but I am sure I read on one of your web pages about community gardening. I would be particularly interested to hear more about this specifically as I live in Nunthorpe Grove.
Hi Jo, community gardening is one of our projects this year, and we’re working with Edible York and others to find somewhere locally to grow food (and probably some flowers too). We have a couple of local possibilities which are not yet agreed, so we’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile, Nunthorpe Grove (and Crescent) are lucky to have big gardens and quiet roads with grass verges – do you think residents would be interested in garden-sharing or in ‘adopting’ a verge, by planting it with herbs etc?
We think you’re INCREDIBLE!