Building a bird reserve from London earth

Radio 1 Minute

Wallasea Island in Essex, England, is Europe’s largest habitat creation project. This reclaimed natural landscape is being built up with spoil excavated from underneath the streets of London, a by-product of the CrossRail engineering project. British builders are carving out lagoons, mudflats and saltmarshes in the hopes of bringing wild birds and other creatures back to the region.

The RSPB's Chris Tyas with a sprig of sea clover.
The RSPB’s Chris Tyas with a sprig of sea clover.
[audio http://radio-download.dw.de/Events/dwelle/dira/mp3/eng/30FCA0E6_1_dwdownload.mp3]

Report by Richard O’Brien.

With thanks to Lori Herber and Saroja Coehlo at Living Planet, where this report initially appeared.

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Published by Richard

Hello! My name is Richard O’Brien, and I’m a critical-creative practitioner interested in early modern theatre and its creative afterlives in the present day. My PhD was on Shakespeare and the development of verse drama. I won the 2015 Ben Jonson Journal Discoveries Award for an article on fictional representations of Jonson. I’m also a widely published poet, and the winner of a 2017 Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. You can contact me about the course on r.t.obrien@bham.ac.uk, or make an appointment to see me in my office, shared with Dr Elizabeth Sandis, just through the computer cluster.

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