Ravensbourne sub catchment

Catchment partnership vision

Our shared partnership vision is of improved rivers providing wider benefits for people and nature at a catchment scale. Where public voices are listened to so that key enhancement and improvement opportunities for our rivers are identified, where new development enhances the river, allowing nature to thrive and enabling opportunities for leisure, education and discovery to benefit local people, and where community volunteer groups are well supported in their work along the river. Our vision also includes these improved rivers being a diverse natural environment with a mosaic of habitats in connected green corridors, where species can move freely and thrive along clean water river corridors. We envisage this connectivity being enjoyed by local communities too: a place where public access to nature is widespread and nature is respected and protected. We aim for a future where the threat of flooding is vastly reduced and strong partnerships between stakeholders ensure communities are protected against climate change impacts and encouraged and fully supported to become stewards of their local river.

Related websites

Find out more about the activities and ambitions of this catchment partnership and how you can get involved to help improve the water environment in the catchment.

• Ravensbourne Catchment Partnership webpage
• Catchment Management Plans on CaBA website

Partnership success highlights 2016 to 2021

Since 2016, the Ravensbourne Catchment Improvement Group, established in 2012, has engaged many varied members including different council representatives in the London Boroughs of Lewisham and Bromley, Thames Water, the Environment Agency and local groups throughout the catchment. Our river champions and volunteers include the Quaggy Waterways Action Group (QWAG) and the Friends of the River Pool who meet regularly to carry out bankside and in-channel work to improve biodiversity and habitats as well as post-restoration habitat management at sites such as Brookmill Park, Manor Park, Cornmill Gardens, Ladywell Fields, Chinbrook Meadows and Sutcliffe Park. These incredible community groups also run long-term catchment-wide projects, like the annual 3 Rivers Clean Up which helps to reduce the prevalence of invasive non-native species (INNS) and remove litter across the three London boroughs (Lewisham, Bromley and Greenwich). Local groups and volunteers have also completed educational events for all ages, raising awareness of the many complex issues affecting the rivers and streams of the Ravensbourne Catchment. For example, volunteers are trained to carry out riverfly surveys every month at several spots around the catchment to monitor water quality and quickly detect pollution incidents. Our partnership has raised and continues to raise the profile of all of these river improvement activities through our webpages, social media and local networks.

Partnership development plans

In future years we would like to include more partners in the partnership, combine volunteering activities among the catchment’s three councils, encourage more visits to other London boroughs to learn from others, and look into funding opportunities with local businesses. We want to make the catchment’s rivers more accessible, extend restoration works across the upper and lower reaches, undertake more natural flood management (NFM) projects in the upper catchment, restore the River Quaggy and provide better habitat and passage for fish across the catchment. We want to develop a clear plan and better communication amongst partners to ensure all of these future projects lead to improvements at the catchment scale as well as at the local scale of a project’s section of river. Similarly, we want to see participation from a variety of stakeholders in the Local Nature Recovery Strategy to identify and support potential opportunities to enhance the aquatic environment within the catchment.