BD25 Wild Uplands - A Ranger's View

"Bradford 2025’s Wild Uplands open-air gallery, at Penistone Hill Country Park is the latest addition to the beautiful Yorkshire landscape.  We’re proud to be a sponsor of BD25, just like the city of culture, Yorkshire Water supports diversity, inclusion and accessibility for all." says Alastair Harvey, lead countryside and woodland advisor at Yorkshire Water.

We are a 24/7 business that supplies fresh, clean water to 5 million people across the Yorkshire region, from coastlines to urban spaces and rural communities.  But we have other commitments to the region too – protecting species and wildlife, looking after the countryside and reservoirs, and helping people to enjoy these spaces safely.

Our rangers celebrated their second anniversary this month, and they are key to this.  For many visitors to our reservoirs, rivers and local communities, they’re the first point of contact and the ambassadors of Yorkshire Water landscapes.  They were pleased to lend a hand with the installation of the large-scale artworks, sharing their expertise to make sure the impressive sculptures of Wild Uplands keep their impact on important, protected moorland, to a minimum.

Rangers and other teams at Yorkshire Water, work closely with nature and conservationist partners, including the National Trust, Moors for the future, the Yorkshire Peat Partnership and many others.  We’re working together to build resilience, protect wildlife and bed-in natural flood management. 

We’re major landowners in the county, and it is a role that we take really seriously.  Our shared focus helps us to find ways to withstand climate change and extreme weather events and adopt nature-based solutions so we can protect this important heritage for future generations to enjoy.

So that as many people as possible can experience this, we’re also proud to partner Experience Community CIC, to make Yorkshire Water landscapes accessible, where we can, so that more people can experience and explore it too.    

We are a 24/7 business operating 365 days a year. Our home office is in Bradford and many of our 5,000 colleagues, live and work in and around the region. Bradford 2025 presents a great opportunity for us to celebrate our roots, in the glorious county of Yorkshire and continue to work towards protecting this beautiful heritage.   

Education plays an important part of this legacy and our education team, our rangers, our river health team and our bathing water partnership team do a huge amount of outreach work.  This includes working with local stakeholders such as councillors and local authorities as well as education providers, schools, colleges and even PhD students.

Whilst we are responsible for delivering a safe and reliable clean water supply and safely removing wastewater, we can’t do it all by ourselves.  Engagement, discussion and debate are also important mainstays of our daily lives.  It is only by this open dialogue can we discover, understand, develop and share our learnings.  From our biodiversity team protecting our native plants, animals and fauna from invasive species to the river health team and partners keeping our coastlines clean, our rivers free and our network running.

It's a joint effort.  Our rangers and our education team work closely with schools to help the next generation understand how water works, how precious it is, and what we need to do as a society, to keep it safe, keep it clean and keep it running.  Others work with citizen scientists to look for solutions to problem waterways and help polluted areas spring back to life by working together.   

As Bradford 2025 will invest in the creative, cultural and artistic legacy of the city, Yorkshire Water will invest over £3m every day across the region for the next five years, to create a lasting legacy of a robust, sustainable water network. 

Our pledge will be to protect the glorious county of Yorkshire to protect our bathing waters, improve our assets, reduce storm overflows and find nature-based solutions that encourage biodiversity, and provide a healthy habitat for nature, wildlife and people to enjoy for generations to come.