The Waltham Forest Open Spaces Forum has worked with other community groups and the Council to get the most benefit from the Borough’s green open spaces. As a friends’ or users’ group is established for each open space we will concentrate on a Borough-wide view, encouraging activities, images and words that celebrate these open spaces. We will help reveal and share their significance and history. We will look for opportunities to improve the quality of our open spaces, and resist loss from neglect, enclosure or built development. We will be improving our use of the web, the local press and other means in reaching out to a wider audience. We will, in short, pursue our aim ‘to help conserve, protect and regenerate open spaces in Waltham Forest’.
 
The Open Spaces and Nature Conservation Focus Group was set up by Waltham Forest Council and people in the local community as part of the Local Agenda 21 process. We have acted as a communication channel for all matters concerning the borough’s green open spaces ever since. We helped prepare the borough’s first biodiversity report and supported instigation of the “Friends of Parks” scheme. We have recently changed our name to the ‘Open Spaces Forum’ because we are more than a pressure group and act as a network of expertise and commitment.
 
We have a longstanding interest in routes that link the borough’s open spaces and we encourage use of footpaths.
 
In the last couple of years we have supported allotment holders displaced by the Olympics development, and helped prevent, by representation at the planning inspector’s public enquiry, construction of 3 blocks of 7 storey flats on the Essex Wharf site (by the Leyton Marshes, the River Lea and Lea Bridge Road).
 
We favour practical solutions and action.