Gearing up for a very busy 2020

No matter how good your website and social media channels, nothing beats the face-to-face conversations we have with people when we attend or run events in and around the South Downs National Park. It’s a chance for people to find out what we do and ask us questions, and for us to talk about the wildlife and landscapes that make the South Downs so special.

Teams from the South Downs National Park Authority attend over 60 events each summer, and talk directly to about 13,000 members of the public.

Much of our engagement work is now centred on drop-ins to town centres just outside the boundary of the national park, bringing our wildlife activities to spark the interest of those who are perhaps not already aware of the natural treasures on their doorstep, together with information on how easy it is to use buses or trains to travel to sites around the South Downs to experience the landscape for real.

We are also running more and more events ourselves and are already planning the South Downs Dark Skies Festival, which celebrates the fact that the national park is an International Dark Reserve and there are still places on the Downs that are so dark it is still possible to see the Milky Way.

The Dark Skies Festival will run from the 7 to 23 February 2020 when we will be taking our ‘Stargazing South Downs’ roadshow to towns around the national park, as well as stargazing evenings, talks and night hikes laid on by our many partners in this now well-established festival of darkness.

The whole of 2020 will be a busy year for us as it is the 10th anniversary of the South Downs National Park coming into being.

So we will be having a second roadshow in the Easter holidays where our rangers will be visiting ten different town centres, so watch out for us and come over and have a chat!