turning tarmac green

The Nature Garden at Lakeside

Have you seen The Nature Garden at Lakeside yet? 🍃

It's the perfect spot to unwind and soak up the beauty of nature! 🌸

And here's a sweet surprise: this is where our hardworking bees are buzzing away and crafting the most delicious Lakeside honey! 🐝🍯

Our aim was to create a beautiful space where our visitors can relax, but is also educational! 💙

Some fun facts about The Nature Garden:

• This is a safe environment for wildlife.
• It is a natural environment and about 30% of our food relies directly on insect pollination. If you wipe out the pollinators, then there would be no more strawberries, apples, almonds, raspberries. Therefore, we need healthy and resilient natural ecosystems to help support a healthy and resilient food system.
• Supports in reducing carbon dioxide.
• We have used lots of recycled materials, some which were recently featured in our Sustainable Maze in April 2024.

A-MAZE-ING Sustainable Fun

At the beginning of April 2024, we welcomed Lakeside's Sustainable Maze! ✨

Picture this: You're wandering through a maze of eco-friendly wonders, where every twist and turn leads you to an adventure in sustainability! 💚

The first stop was to build your own terrarium! This was a chance to get your hands dirty and create your own little green paradise to take home 🏠

Our T-Shirt swap was a huge hit - this was a place to trade in your old tees for some fresh, sustainable threads. Reduce, reuse and refresh your style! 👕

The Kinetic Bike was also very popular! This was a place to power up the fun whilst generating energy - talk about a workout with a purpose! ♻️

Our 'Did You Know' zone was a chance to test your knowledge with our interactive quiz but explore the maze at the same time. This was a chance to discover fascinating sustainability facts at every turn and become a sustainability superstar! ⭐

At Lakeside, we're all about having a blast while making a positive impact. We wanted our sustainable maze to be a journey of discovery, education, and eco-conscious fun... and, judging by the reviews, it's safe to say this maze was an A-MAZE-ING hit! 🌟🌿

Lakeside's Bat Boxes

To help the local Bat population around the Alexandra Lake area we have installed four Bat Boxes for our local bats to roost and breed 🦇

As the Alexandra Lake is a vital source of food and drink for our local Bats, we felt as though this was the perfect location to install the boxes.

You will find the boxes around the lake, in the trees and we hope this will encourage the population! 💙

Did you know?

The common pipistrelle is so small, it can fit into a matchbox! Despite its size, it can easily eat 3,000 insects a night: look for it flitting around the garden or a lit lamp post as it chases its prey.

Bird Feeders Competition

A few weeks back, our incredible HR team organised a super exciting 'Bird Feeder' Competition for the Lakeside management team! 🐦

The challenge? Create a bird feeder using recycled items and let your creativity do the rest! ♻

We were thrilled to see so many enthusiastic participants in this eco-friendly project (huge shout out to all of you for taking part) and we even brought in an unbiased panel to ensure fairness in judging the entries.

And drumroll, please... 🥁

The winning bird feeder was none other than our very own Duty Manager, Aaron!

A massive congratulations to Aaron for his outstanding craftsmanship and creativity and of course, to all those who participated!

National Recycling Day

On Saturday 16th March 2024, we hosted a day of fun, learning and environmental awareness to support National Recycling Day! ♻

At Lakeside Shopping Centre our commitment to sustainability and environmental responsibility drives us to support events that encourage your recycling habits and we were thrilled to have the opportunity to showcase our recycling efforts on this special occasion, along with our free craft activities!

Bird Nesting Islands

As some of our regular customers may know we have been having some refurbishment works carried out on The Boardwalk decking which resulted in a lot of old deck boards being available. So instead of sending the boards of to be recycled we decided to use some of them to create some wildlife bird nesting islands!

This involved collecting damaged wooden pallets to use as the base of the islands then fixing the decking boards to the pallet to create a platform. Once the platform was built each island has a different type of nesting box / area for different breed of birds to nest.

Some of the birds we currently have nesting on the lake are Grey leg Goose, Canada Goose, Coots, Egyptian Goose, Ducks and Great Crested Grebe.

Turning Tarmac Green

Here at Lakeside as part of our sustainability initiative, we have utilised a small piece of unused tarmac to turn into an allotment for our staff to nurture. We aim to recycle and reuse as much material as possible to get this project running smoothly. Benefits to having an allotment are:

- We can eat and donate the food we grow to our staff and local community

- We are encouraging exercise and benefitting mental health by involving our staff in the project

- We are creating a sense of community

- We are helping to improve the environment and the benefits of local wildlife

To find out further benefits to creating and maintaining an allotment, click here.

Our Bee's Have Moved for 2023!

Our Urban Bees are settling in and exploring their surroundings at the new location at Lakeside Shopping Centre!

Surrounded by wild flowers and plants often mistakenly referred to as weeds, diverse forage is vital for bees and other pollinating insects. They may even have a few neighbours in the birdboxes too!

After joining us in the Summer of 2022, our Bee's had a successful honey harvest and we were able to harvest 100 jar's of honey. These jar's were open to our staff to buy in order for a donation to our charity of the year. Keep an eye out for more bee activity in 2023!

Our project is realized in collaboration with Alvéole, a social beekeeping company. Since 2013, Alvéole has partnered with hundreds of companies and schools to start beekeeping projects all over North America and Europe, each hive creating more ecological awareness, allowing city dwellers to reconnect with nature and change their sense of responsibility towards the environment.

Lakeside secures double triumph at the Green Apple Awards 2023

Lakeside Shopping Centre proudly announces its esteemed Green Apple Awards, recognising outstanding efforts in sustainability initiatives. To read more about this, click here.