MORE than 300 schoolchildren from the Buxton area braved this week’s cold weather and rolled up their sleeves to help clean up their local park in a community pride event led by Buxton & Leek College students.
The Big Railings Clean, which has now become an annual event in Buxton, saw students and primary school pupils working together with the Buxton Town Team to clean up the railings surrounding the town’s Pavilion Gardens. Burbage School, Buxton Community School, Fairfield Junior School and St Anne’s School all sent along willing young workers who donned tabards and gloves and got to work with sponges to wash down the railings ready for the summer season.
Buxton & Leek College students project managed the event from start to finish by creating risk assessments, contacting local schools and organising sponsorship in the form of donations. They collected plastic milk cartons to help them maintain a supply of water for the cleaning.
A college spokesman said: “The key message is that we own these gardens as a community and we are all responsible for their upkeep. We are very proud in Buxton to have such a beautiful public park.”
Supporting the event were volunteers from St John’s Ambulance, the High Peak Borough Council and Buxton Town Team. Helen Davison from Buxton Town Team said: “We were very proud to work with college. Their students and staff all worked incredibly hard to achieve a day of fun and learning for all the schoolchildren and clean railing for Buxton’s Pavilion Gardens.”
The students did apply for a Guinness World record for cleaning railings but were unfortunately un-successful.
