Teaching about London National Park City
August 2025
In June, I shared that a set of resources I’d been working on for a while with the London National Park City (LNPC) movement had gone live. In this short blog, I want to give a bit more context around these resources, what we were aiming to do and why we made them. For more detail about the thinking behind the resources, listen to this podcast here.
I have been involved with LNPC for many years now having been inducted as an inaugural volunteer ranger in summer 2020. As a ranger, I’ve done various bits and bobs but have always wanted to do more to help spread the message of what’s happening to make London greener, healthier and wilder. And so, the idea of these fact files was born! We wanted to create a series of simple fact files that shared key information about various projects within LNPC. We know that urban greening, biodiversity projects and sustainable flood management are regularly taught about in geography classrooms from Key Stage 3 to Key Stage 5 but that it can be hard to find up-to-date examples with the right information shared. So, that’s what we hope we’ve achieved with this set of resources.
This first set of resources is very simply 5 fact files about projects taking place within the city to make London greener, healthier and wilder. To ensure they are as simple as possible for teachers to use and thus can be used in a wide range of different classrooms, we did the following:
Used the language of the (most popular) AQA GCSE Geography specification as our starting point. This means we’re consistent in how we’ve defined biodiversity, sustainability, soft engineering, and other keywords.
Ensured the location of the project was front and centre of the introduction to the project. This will, hopefully, help students to see that these are not abstract ideas of what could be done to help with urban sustainability but real-life projects happening in urban areas similar to theirs across London.
Defined the keywords that students would need to know in order to use and apply these case studies to questions about urban greening and urban sustainability.
Gave 2-3 questions for students to consider at the end of each fact file so that they can think about how this example project relates to their wider learning. Although not formally labelled as exam-style questions, teachers will recognise many of them as such.
Used some photographs on the fact files but supplemented these with many more on a free to download online slide deck. This means that the fact files can be printed in black and white on 1 A4 side and so won’t hurt anyone’s budget too much!
To download the 5 fact files and photos to use alongside, please click the button below. There are free but you will need to enter an email address.
The resources and thinking behind them are discussed in more detail here.