Mossley Community Centre picks up 'outstanding' award at Britain in Bloom

The community centre on Roughtown Road Mossley has yet again been praised by the Britian in Bloom awards for their community garden.

Every year The Royal Horticultural Society hold the prestigious Britain in Bloom awards, which is the largest horticultural campaign in the UK. The award encourages cities and towns of all sizes across the nation to make positive action through community, horticultural and environmental action.

The awards are broken down into 13 categories. Many Britain in Bloom entries are submitted by community groups that are already established or are led by the local authority in the area, such as Mossley Community Centre's submissions.

This year, the group have entered their garden and have – for the seventh year running – picked up an outstanding award. We spoke with co-ordinator Angie Taylor to find out more about the garden and the community's latest award.

“The garden is our enclosed wall garden at the back of the community centre.” Angie said. “This is year seven that we have achieved 'outstanding' in the category, and we are achieving into the 90s in the category which is good.”

The “it’s your neighbourhood” category which promotes community groups to enhance green spaces and clean up their community is judged as follows:

As shown in the table above, achieving anywhere above 86 warrants the 'outstanding' award, so for Mossley Community Centre to be getting outstanding ratings multiple years in a row is an impressive feat.

Angie gave us more detail about the marking, telling us: “There are different categories in the marking, such as recycling and if you have reached out to the community. When you get the marking back you can see where you have dropped points, such as planting or attracting for wildlife. We have got a patch that is used for attracting wildlife that we leave undisturbed, and we are recycling where we can and are making use of some pallets this year to create new planters this year. Really, we run it with volunteers taking the lead.”

The gardens are volunteer-led, and Angie told us that the garden “provides our volunteers a very good network for people who might be on their own or isolated.” She added: “We are all good at different things and we all just have a nice time getting together on a Wednesday.”

Outside of the award-winning community garden, Mossley Community Centre team are active in many other areas of the town. “We also do outreach work, and we have a car boot sale on the marketplace,” Angie told us. “We collaborate and work with Mossley Town Team and Friends of Mossley Park, so we are very much a community affair with the other gardeners that enter in the same categories. We held our presentation dinner here last week; all three groups were represented, and we had a meal afterwards.”

To see more from Mossley Community Centre, head to their website at https://mossleycommunitycentre.org.uk/