Shakespeare’s home town gets a spruce up
A guest post from Lisa Preston who has organised a local clean up day in Stratford upon Avon on 26 February.
I've organised a litter pick up day because I was shocked by the amount of litter on my 40-minute walk to work. I live in Stratford upon Avon, a beautiful town and a major tourist attraction. We have the theatres, a lovely river and lots of historical sites. So it is all of our interest to keep our streets clean for visitors and ourselves.
We'll be picking up litter using pick-up sticks, gloves & bags provided by the council. I expect it to take a couple of hours. I have to take the bags home, and they will arrange the contractor to collect the bags of litter from us.
Take responsibility
What annoys me is when people moan about litter, and expect our Council to do it all. Litter is a community problem, a people problem, not solely a Council problem.
We can all talk about imposing penalties for litter dropping and so on. Yes, I think the punishment should be severe, and penalties should be implemented. But in the end, there will always be litter, at some level, because of the amount of people who live on our little island called Great Britain!
Twitter: a great communication tool
I've used Twitter to connect with like-mined people. It is great for sharing information and certainly since I started Tweeting about litter, I have met people with this common interest.
Also for business it has been really great, I have met lots of local business people and have since met many 'face to face'. We regularly meet for a 'Tweet Up', which is a get-together in a local business premises, for drinks and nibbles & networking.
About four months ago I joined the Committee of our local branch of the Federation of Small Business, and I am pleased to say that our Clean Up day has now been added as a local FSB event. So it is now gaining more publicity.
Business and litter
My intention is to keep networking with other business owners in our town, to encourage them to clean up their own premises and the local area nearby.
As we know, there are plenty of local culprits, normally in the fast food business who need to take more responsibility for their environment!
Since I announced the Clean Up day, I have since learned that a local Councillor is involved with a Clean Up Working Party, which is great news. It looks like there are plenty of people in Stratford Upon Avon keen to do their bit.
Morrison's supermarket has already been contacted, and also the Railway Station has started cleaning up, as their premises are in a terrible state.
There are probably clean ups on a much grander scale than mine, but I will still persist with my little effort!"
Lisa is just one of thousands of people up and down Britain who are doing their bit to clean up towns, cities and the countryside. We'd love to hear from anyone involved in community clean-ups!
Thanks for printing this article - I hope it inspires others to just make that commitment, organise a day and more importantly - have fun with it! Life is too short to take ourselves too seriously - but we should take our community responsibility seriously and just pick up litter to make a difference.
Hello Lisa, I love the sentiment that we should have fun at the same time as taking this work seriously. Thanks so much for dropping by and well done with the litter pick!