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Recently Yorkshire Water and Laing O'Rourke joined forces to construct the base of a Bird Hide at the St Ives Estate. Yorkshire Water have recently been carrying out disruptive, but essential, road works in the Bingley area and wanted to compensate the local community in some token way.

A team of their workforce came as unpaid volunteers and spent several days in wet, muddy conditions building the base and its connecting "All Users Pathway".

We are very grateful to both companies for contributing to St Ives in this way.

The Bird Hide itself will be in place sometime early in the New Year (being paid for as part of our WREN Award). The Screen will have viewing slots situated at different heights to allow all users to view the birds. There will also be an Interpretive Board with pictures and information about the birds you may see and a feeding station situated to rear of the Hide in order to attract the birds to that area and give them some extra food during the winter.

The Friends of St Ives have just won £250,000 in the Communities Challenge Award competition beating over 174 other groups across England to be amongst the six winners. This award comes from a Group called WRG (Waste Regeneration Ltd) who can give back to the community a percentage of the landfill tax they accrue. Another Group called WREN (Waste Recycling Environmental) administers the Challenge.

We are very proud and excited to have achieved this and want to thank Bradford Council's Parks and Landscape Team for their partnership and excellent support with this application!

Representatives of our Committee and Gillian Biggs (from Bradford Council), travelled down to the House of Commons to receive our Award where we received also excellent support and hospitality from Philip Davies our local MP who supports our group.

With this money, we aim to enhance the Estate in many ways, whilst always respecting its integrity.

Briefly, we hope to:

· Restore two rooms in the Coach House to use as a visitors'/information Centre and classroom facility,

· Create a medieval herb garden to remind visitors of St Ives' monastic heritage, create wildflower/butterfly meadows,

· Improve the paths and bridleways and form a proper 'less able' path around Coppice Pond,

· Site appropriately positioned extra seats,

· Create a Bird Hide,

· Put in recycling bins in environmentally and visually friendly materials,

· Improve the playground, both structurally (drainage) and with new, more imaginative equipment,

· More bird boxes

· Do extensive restoration work around the perimeters of Coppice Pond with replanting and reforming the edges of the lake.

For many of these projects we would welcome volunteers' assistance. If you are interested in volunteering your help will be welcomed.

Please contact us by email at projects@friendsofstives.org.uk