May is the month we mark our birthday – our 7th this year – and hold our AGM – an opportunity to review what we’ve achieved and look forward to the coming year’s activities.

We maximise participation of our 850 members by holding a hybrid meeting which is also recorded. So you can watch a recording HERE and see the slides HERE.

In the past year we held our usual full programme of walks and talks on nature and heritage themes. We had great success with our social bowls sessions, which saw on average a dozen people play at each session. We’re also pleased to have helped bring pilates and yoga back to Naturescope and introduce outdoor Qi Gong classes to the Common. Another highlight of the year was our first ever dog show in September, which we’ll be repeating this year. We also held a successful quiz night themed on Wandsworth Common.

The Heritage group remain very active and is gathering more and more material on the Lost Houses of Wandsworth Common. Another enterprise is the acquisition of a collection of over 900 old postcards of Wandsworth Common and its surrounds, which we aim to display digitally in the coming year.

So there‘s a lot going on and we welcome anyone who’s willing to help us fulfil our mission to engage users in the protection and preservation of Wandsworth Common. To that end we also had a useful Q&A about the proposed changes to the Council’s events policy which attracted considerable interest.

May also sees the annual Beating of the Bounds of Battersea, organised by the Battersea Society and supported by FoWC. We gather for refreshments and stories under the ancient boundary oak on the border of Battersea and Wandsworth parishes which runs through Wandsworth Common.

May also sees our first bat walk of the year which this year confirmed last year’s sighting of the quite rare Serotine bat – making it the 7th bat species found on the Common. Our citizen scientists continue to monitor our bats on a regular basis if you’d like to join them at twilight.