Across Cornwall, our towns are adapting to a changing climate and to a growing understanding of what makes urban places healthy, welcoming and resilient. Streets are an important part of that picture. They are not simply routes from one place to another, but spaces where people meet, pause, move through their communities and experience nature as part of everyday life.
At Mei Loci, we are working across Cornwall, with Truro, Camborne, Penzance and Helston to help create greener, more pedestrian-friendly streets and accessible public spaces. Through landscape-led design, street greening and climate-resilient planting, our aim is to make more room for both people and nature within Cornwall’s towns.
Urban greening can transform the character and performance of a street. Introducing trees, planting and biodiverse landscapes into the public realm creates opportunities to soften hard urban environments and strengthen connections with nature. But the value goes far beyond appearance. Well-designed planting can provide habitat and food for wildlife, contribute to urban cooling, support more resilient ecosystems and help towns respond to the pressures of a changing climate.
Our approach is to think about planting as an integral part of the street, rather than an addition to it. By considering species, seasonality, resilience and biodiversity from the outset, we can create landscapes that are beautiful, robust and capable of evolving over time.
Climate-resilient planting is particularly important. As Cornwall experiences changing patterns of rainfall, warmer temperatures and more frequent extremes, our public landscapes need to be designed for the conditions of the future as well as those of today.
Greener streets are also about creating better places for people. Across our work in Truro, Camborne, Penzance and Helston, we are exploring how the public realm can become more comfortable, accessible and enjoyable on foot. Creating pedestrian-friendly environments means thinking carefully about how people of different ages and abilities experience a place, from the clarity and accessibility of routes to opportunities to sit, rest, meet and spend time outdoors.
When streets become places where people feel comfortable lingering rather than simply passing through, they can support stronger social connections and a greater sense of wellbeing.
Landscape plays a powerful role in this. The presence of planting, seasonal change, shade, texture and wildlife can turn an everyday journey into a richer experience and create moments of contact with nature within even the most urban parts of a town.
One of our ambitions is to help Cornwall’s towns function as living landscapes. Trees, rain gardens, planted verges, beds and pockets of habitat all have value, but their impact becomes greater when we consider them as part of a wider ecological network. Streets and public spaces can help connect existing green spaces, creating stepping stones for wildlife and extending nature further into the urban environment.
This means looking beyond individual interventions and considering how an entire town can become greener and more ecologically connected. In Cornwall, where our towns sit within an extraordinary wider landscape, there is a particular opportunity to strengthen the relationship between urban areas and the natural environment surrounding them.
Greener streets can provide habitats, offer shade and seasonal interest. Greener streets create a more pleasant walk into town, a comfortable place to sit or simply a moment of nature within someone’s day. Individually, these interventions can feel small. Together, they contribute to something much bigger: healthier urban nature, more resilient towns and public spaces that put people and the environment at their heart.
For us, greening Cornwall’s streets is about creating places that work harder for everyone. Places where nature is not pushed to the edges, but woven into everyday life; where walking is comfortable and welcoming; and where our towns can become greener, healthier and more resilient for generations to come.
