2023’s Civic Day – Saturday 17th June
Civic Day is a national celebration of civic pride – a day on which residents can demonstrate their care for the place where they live by taking action to undertake a variety of community tasks ranging from gardening and weeding to litter picking and graffiti cleaning.
Civic Voice – the national body for civic societies – co-ordinates Civic Day across the UK, while Cheltenham Civic Society acts as the local umbrella organisation for all the events in our town. We worked closely with Cheltenham BID to make Saturday 17th June a memorable day.
We decided to focus on cleaning up The Strand and Cambray Place, both being in need of a lot of TLC.
Nearly 30 volunteers gathered at Parmoor on the Saturday morning to be briefed and equipped with hi-vis vests, tools and cleaning materials. They then launched an all-out 3-hour set-to on the two areas – scraping weeds and dog-ends out of paving cracks, peeling stickers off street furniture and cleaning a mass of sprayed-on graffiti off walls, posters, street signs, utility boxes and just about every other surface. You can see how hard they all worked in the photo gallery above.
Amongst the volunteers were Cheltenham Mayor, Cllr Matt Babbage, and CCS member, MP and Lord Chancellor, Alex Chalk – who both found the time to put in a shift.
For those who notice and care about the state of our town centre, the results were astounding. There were no more dead weeds; the graffiti problem was much reduced; and the whole area looked much cleaner, fresher and more welcoming.
Now, we just need Gloucestershire County Council to commit to doing something about the dire state of the paving in The Strand. (NB: They do plan to resurface the worst section of Cambray Place in the next quarter.)