Nature reserve built with help of soil from Crossrail scheme is to expand
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A marshland nature reserve built with the help of more than three million tonnes of soil from the Crossrail scheme is to be expanded. RSPB Wallasea Island, in Essex, includes vast amounts of material excavated during the construction of tunnels beneath London for the Elizabeth Line.
This was brought to Wallasea by ship and used to raise land levels and create a new 115-hectare intertidal area of salt marsh, islands and mudflats at the Crouch and Roach estuaries. Now the 740-hectare reserve at Rochford is set to grow by a further 100 hectares – an area the size of 140 football pitches – with the purchase of four fields to the west of the site.
This will enable the creation of a new lagoon at the wildlife haven, which will provide the reserve’s first body of freshwater and vast areas of natural grassland. The RSPB hopes the expansion will provide further habitat to rare and threatened wildlife such as lapwings, redshanks and avocets.
The island was originally developed on arable farmland owned by Wallasea Farms, and the newly purchased fields on the west boundary of the reserve also come from the same farm. The farm owners had been wanting to sell the land for a while due to the challenging impacts of climate change on coastal areas, with the low seawall on the south of the island making the land susceptible to sea level rise.
Conservationists from the RSPB will be creating a six-hectare lagoon in the easternmost of the four fields. The other three new fields will be developed into a mixed scrub/ grassland mosaic with additional wet areas to provide extra habitat for breeding lowland farmland birds called corn buntings, as well as feeding habitat for wintering raptors.
