Over the last few years the Tilehurst Globe Group has organised an annual Tilehurst Rescue event. A concentrated effort involving group members, volunteers and local businesses is directed towards cleaning up one or more local eyesores over a single Rescue weekend.
Each Rescue weekend is preceded by a poster campaign during which local businesses are asked to display posters in their windows, and also asked to sponsor the activities by providing prizes for the volunteers.
Many thanks to all the people who came and helped us tidy Tilehurst! And a big thank you also to the many sponsors who supported us for the 2011 event.
The weather was good and an excellent number of people came out to help tidy up. We will produce a report about the event in time, but briefly we cleared the central Tilehurst area on Saturday morning, Blundells Copse on Saturday afternoon (many thanks to all the children from Teviot Road who came and helped). On Sunday morning we were in McIlroys and Sunday afternoon we cleared Gypsy Lane.
In short, we thought there was less litter and dumping that in previous years, but we still managed to clear 75 big bags of litter and more in the way of heavy litter and dumped electrical items.
This year Reading Council did not provide us with skips and the dustcarts worked for shorter hours in an effort to cut down on the expense of the Rescue event, which is laudible, and despite our fears about how it would work, on the whole we managed ok.