It is widely known that young people face many barriers to accessing the nature spaces available to them. Anika responds to this issue, highlighting one of the reasons many young people don't access their local nature is that they don't know enough about it.

Young people know what is told to them, and not enough is being told to them.

These places aren’t advertised or told to the youth, so if it’s not a local park they don’t know about it and if they have heard of it there's issues getting to it. I knew of London Wildlife Trust, but I didn't know of a lot of the places which are available. These nature spaces are often hard to access without a car and very far / long [to get to] on transport. Sometimes it’s too much effort to get there and back, and they may not be allowed to be out for that long so their time is too valuable, so the youth find it easier to just go somewhere local.

Young people often don’t know what’s out there and available to them if they did want to explore or connect with nature, and so we can’t access nature spaces other than the one close to us which tend to be really overcrowded and ‘dull’ in comparison to bigger nature areas. There's nothing exciting about these small nature spaces within the city too - they're overused by many, and again have a ‘dull’ aspect of it. This kind of takes the fun, influence, engaging and exciting aspect of nature away from young people and a lot of them can become disengaged because of it. Especially with technology, the local park doesn't really stand out for young people to want to go to.

This piece was created by Anika Ali during the online delivery of the Keeping It Wild Traineeship with London Wildlife Trust. The traineeship is one strand of the Keeping It Wild Project. This project is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and this particular activity strand was supported by Tallow Chandlers.