Hidden gem will be showcase for public and wildlife haven
Two-year project to re-route urban chalk stream
A hidden West Sussex gem will soon be open to the public after two years of work re-routing an urban chalk stream to create a flourishing area for wildlife.
A sneak preview of the Broadwater Brook stream, between Worthing and Sompting, was given last Friday, with walking tours for visitors to the EPIC River and Agecraft Exhibition at the Harriet Johnson Centre.
Linda Kerrison, volunteer and engagement officer at the Ouse and Adur Rivers Trust, guided small groups through Sompting Brooks to see how the stream has been opened up.
Most of it had not been visible since the Second World War, until the EPIC (Enhancing Places, Inspiring Communities) Project was awarded a £871,400 Heritage Lottery Fund grant to uncover a 1km section to improve the area’s natural heritage.
Linda said: “We lovingly call it a river but it is really a wetland system.
“Half the money was for the river to make it better for wildlife and the environment, half was for community-based projects.
“More than 1,000 individuals have been involved, including doing ecological surveys.
“We are looking to see what was there to start with and will then look at how much we have improved it.
“We had never done anything quite on this scale, so it was quite a big learning curve.”
The source of the river is a pond behind The Gardeners Arms and a lot of the brook runs underground, an aquifer that dries up through the summer.
Broadwater Brook, which joins up with the Teville Stream in Worthing, is about 2.5km long and the trust has ‘played with’ about 1km of it.
Linda said: “It is very flat, which caused problems at the start.
“It is highly polluted, as it takes road run-off, and has a lot of sedimentation. Anything that goes down the drains in the road ends up in the river.
“We didn’t want to disturb the old route, so the option was to do nothing or start a whole new route.
“We started with an arable field that had been used for intensive farming.”
There are 20 acres of arable farmland and part of it is a nature reserve that is not open to the public.
Linda said: “It had got all sorts of things that we don’t like in water. We really needed to clean it and make it better.
“We wanted to make it resilient to climate change and to reconnect it with the local area and the wildlife.
“We also wanted it to be a bit of a showcase for the people of Sompting.
“People will be able to walk around here, there is a picnic area and a willow hide for watching wildlife.
“It is a really calm place to be. Bordered by East Worthing, Lancing, the A27 and the railway line, it is a hidden gem, something you don’t expect in the area.
“There were 120 species when we first started and two years later, we can count 500 species here.
“This little stream has done something quite remarkable. It is grown vegetation, which is very unusual in the area as generally Sussex streams don’t have a lot of that. That is probably because it is not very fast flowing.
“It has these amazing plants in there and they are doing a job for us in cleaning up the river. It is as clean as we can make it thanks to nature itself.”
Sompting Brooks will open to the public on Monday, September 6, and can be accessed via a permissive footpath at the bottom of Loose Lane.
Peter King, director of the Ouse and Adur Rivers Trust, said the project was grateful to players of the National Lottery and other significant funders, including the Environment Agency.
For all the latest news from across West Sussex, visit our website at www. westsussextoday.co.uk