Save Lodge Hill

Lodge Hill, the UK's most important home for nightingales and protected as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), is under threat from development. 

If the nightingales’ home is allocated for housing, it means that other protected places across the country are at risk as well.

With your help, we’ve made good progress over a number of years to save Lodge Hill SSSI from being covered in houses. 

The latest consultation stage closed on 25 June 2018, and over 10,000 people sent messages to ask the council not to allocate it for houses, which was a brilliant effort. We can't stress enough how important it is to have all of those responses to show that people care. 

Thank you for all your support so far - and we hope we can call on you again if we need to when we find out what the council intends to do, towards the end of 2018.

Medway Council will now consider all the consultation responses and decide how to move forward with their Local Plan.

They will then produce the next draft, which goes out for the final stage of public consultation, we believe in late 2018 or early 2019.

The owner of Lodge Hill - the government agency called Homes England - has also said that they will submit a new planning application for houses at Lodge Hill, and that could be towards the end of 2018 as well.

With all your help, a big marker has been put in the ground that Lodge Hill SSSI and its nightingales should be saved. We will be watching very closely for the next moves.

The nightingale is one of our most severely-threatened birds – its population has declined by more than 90% in the last 50 years. Fewer than 5,500 pairs now remain across the country. 

The range of nightingales has also contracted dramatically, so they are now found only in the south and east of England. 

Lodge Hill in Medway, Kent, is their best remaining site, critical for their survival, and so special that it is protected for the nation as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).

But, in a long-running saga, it is under threat of being lost to a housing development. 

To lose it like that would mean the loss of most of the nightingales and other wildlife that lives there and would set a very worrying precedent for all our other protected sites.  

Thousands of you helped us get the original planning application “called-in” by government and, thanks to your efforts, the application was dropped.

Thousands of you then called on Medway Council to revise its plans. In the spring 2018 consultation, it had made some changes, but not gone anywhere near far enough.

Nightingales were once seen across large parts of England (the areas shown in blue), but they have declined by 90% in the last 50 years. Now, these iconic birds are found at just a handful of sites (shown in red), the most important being Lodge Hill.