Greater Anglia wants to find community volunteers who can help spruce up and enhance their local station

Rail company Greater Anglia wants local residents to get involved with volunteering at their local railway stations “to help drive improvements and make them more welcoming to passengers”.

There are vacancies for so-called ‘station adopters’ at Enfield Lock, Brimsdown, Meridian Water, Northumberland Park and Tottenham Hale stations on the West Anglia Main Line through eastern Enfield and Haringey.

Greater Anglia hopes that residents, community organisations or local councils who have an interest in improving their local rail station and bringing it into the heart of the community will come forward with their ideas. 

The rail operator provides funding to help cover the costs of small projects, tools and materials to help improve each station environment.

The station adoption programme, first launched in East Anglia in 2003, has been hailed a “great success” as it enables people to contribute to the station’s presentation and welfare for the benefit of the local community.

The voluntary scheme was originally created to improve lines of communication between the train operator and station users but, over the years, it has “grown to become much more” with station adopters now playing an active role in keeping stations looking good through gardening projects that create an attractive welcome and support local wildlife and biodiversity, creative community art projects and taking part in station ‘health checks’, as well as being “the eyes and ears of their station”.

Greater Anglia now has 330 adopters at 125 stations across Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire and London, but the operator is seeking adopters for the final few.

Alan Neville, Greater Anglia’s customer and community engagement manager, said: “We would love to see every station on the network adopted as it makes such a positive difference when the community is actively involved in their local station.

“Station adoption creates mutually beneficial relationships and dialogue to help us understand what improvements are important to local people and promotes civic pride and wellbeing by bringing people together and enhancing public spaces.”

Anyone interested in adopting their station should contact Alan Neville, who runs the station adoption initiative:
Email [email protected]

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