What is Spirit of Place?

As part of the council's Future Parks strategy, the Spirit of Place process for Oldbury Court / Vassalls Park, aims, through community involvement, to set out what is special and unique about our park, and to provide great insights for taking projects forwards.

What makes our park special?

Understanding what makes our park distinctive and unique is built from people’s emotional reactions to:

• physical features, such as scenery and buildings

• cultural aspects

• heritage

• aesthetic qualities

The Spirit of Place project was advertised via the Friends of the Park group and invited anyone with an interest to be part of it. Two workshops were held at the Vassalls Centre in Summer 2024, to walk-round, share stories and knowledge, and to identify themes from people's responses and reactions to aspects of the park.

From here our generated ideas and thoughts will be transformed into a map and website entry to support future thinking about approaches to park maintenance, use and development. Here are some examples from other similar projects in other Bristol parks.

The process

What next?

While the next stage of the project is being developed we already have a couple of themes emerging: connections and trees. We are taking these forward with, amongst all our other activities, a bid to develop a great new community noticeboard and a tree trail for the park over the next few months.

If you would like to be involved...

Please get in touch via the contact page or our Facebook group.