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Accessible greenspace strategies for Sheffield parks

Sensory Trust worked with Sheffield Parks Woodlands and Countryside (PWC) to help them develop a process of improving access across their 700 sites.

We developed a site audit tool to be used by Sheffield PWC’s Rangers. The audit tool was designed to enable the Rangers to identify and record barriers to accessing sites at all the different stages of a visitor experience.

The tool requires recording information, giving all sites a set of scores relating to:

accessibility of a site,
ease of barrier removal, and
who faces the most barriers when trying to access a particular site.

The numerical data provides comparisons between sites so managers can prioritise sites for barrier removal. Rangers trialed the first draft of the audit tool and working method during February 2005.

The outcome of the project was to produce a tool and method that could be adopted by any Local Authority to ingrain a process of access awareness and improvement into the day-to-day workload.