A LIVING ROOF
Moorgate Crofts 20th October 2005

This is a business start up building in Rotherham. It was opened recently by Prince Andrew. It has a planted roof a bit like the one we are hoping will go on our new school.
Our first mission was to visit the building and look at what is was like and to see the plants and to talk to some of the people who helped to make it.


Our new Sharrow Primary School is going to have a bio-diverse roof. It will be flat, but it will have a special covering that will encourage wild flowers and plants, these will provide food and for insects and birds and hopefully other animals. This sort of roof helps to keep our city green, it soaks up lots of rain and stops all the big puddles and floods when we have a storm. It will help keep the new school cool in the summer by evaporation (when the sun makes the wet dry up). It can help clean up the air from all the pollution from cars and they do lots of other good things too.

See these websites for more details:
http://www.groundwork-sheffield.org.uk/index.asp?page=29
http://www.livingroofs.org/livingpages/greenroofintro.html

Here we are sitting on what looks like a beach but is actually crushed bricks with some plants growing in it. Plants on our roof will be a mixture of things like a meadow and wild plants that would have found places to grow on derelict ground in forgotten corners. These are the spaces that many plants, insects and other wildlife like to live in a city like ours. We hope that insects birds and animals will find their dinner or make their home on our new roof.

We hope that we will be able to afford to have a camera watch the wildlife on the roof and a computer inside school will show us what is going on. Also there will be a stair up onto the roof so that some people can go up to look at things and do research but there will also be some planting on lower roof terraces so we can see the plants close up.

PARTNERING WORKSHOP
October 20th 2005- at the 'Hub' next to Mount Pleasant

We weren't sure what a workshop was but everyone on the team was invited. We had to meet everyone and explain who we were and what our job was on the project. No one had ever had a construction buddy on their project before and we felt very proud to be doing such new and exciting work.

Here we are having lunch with everyone. There was a lovely chicken curry and rice, but we had crisps.

We had been talking about some important things in the morning, like what we could do to raise more money to pay for all the things we would like in the new school and how to be realistic about what we want so it doesn't cost too much. We also talked a lot about the challenges facing the project and how we could manage them and help make the new school the best it could be for the community.

Here are some of the others who were there. You can see David on the left(Head of the school governors) and Rob from the Education Authority.





Kathryn from the Education Authority is wearing the purple top and next to her is Evelyn from Sharrow Primary School.






We spent a lot of time listening to each other to hear what the project really means to everyone and the community. What they were hoping to achieve and how we can help each other.

This photo was taken at the edge of Mount Pleasant Park while the sun was still shining