By Monica Jones
The new Studios Walk was unveiled last month and Shepperton Matters was invited to a walk around the new pathways.
The Studios Walk forms part of the landscape associated with the old Littleton House and park, and has an interesting history. The gar-dens boasted many follies and statues, the remains of which can still be spotted if you look hard. The Ash was most famously used in scenes Sanders of the River in the 1950s.
This has been a considerable investment, we are told £1m. What it offers is a clean and neat pathway around the river Ash, which flows between the two studios sites. The walk is literally sandwiched between the two parts and is a welcome reprieve from the now very industrial site.
There are benches along the walkway and the 1.75km circular walk is now linked by a wooden bridge. Some have criticised the stu-dios for not making this wheelchair friendly, but the walk can be completed along the walkways in both directions.
The amount of biodiversity on the site is in-credible. One of the project managers told me that they had seen evidence of otters. Habitat creation works provide a range of features for invertebrates, small mammals, reptiles and fungi.
There are interpretation boards along the walk, so you know what to look out for in the various habitats. Look up and you will see bird and bat boxes. Off the pathways, areas of vegetation have been left wild to provide refuge for wildlife where they can get away from disturbance.
There have been negative comments on so-cial media about the extent of the trees that have been cleared to make way for the path-ways. It is true that a lot of trees have been thinned or removed. Some were rotten, some suffering from Ash Die Back disease. Many more young saplings have been planted and these will fill out as they mature.
All in all this is a great addition to the com-munity, offering a nice clean walk, where previously you may have been up to your ankles in mud at certain times of the year! We pointed out the lack of dog poo bins how-ever. The addition of bins would encourage users to keep the area clean. Spelthorne coun-cil receive a generous contribution annually for this project. So a few poo bins would be a good use of money.
The only other comment I would personally make is the state of the old statues and re-mains of the Littleton estate which are disap-pearing increasingly into the undergrowth and the river. The Ash is very grown over in parts and in urgent need of clearing. The river god statue is almost invisible now, as is the statue in the grotto . These are a link to the past. It would be great to see these remains of the estate restored, with information boards about how the estate used to look perhaps.