Drought conditions, hose pipe bans and forecasts predicting more hot and dry weather in September – that’s all bad news for the borough’s floral displays!
And so, when councillors wanted to brighten up the dried and parched greenery in the planters along the A180 flyover quickly, and cheaply – with saving water in mind – they decided that artificial flowers were the way to go.
A driving force behind Cleethorpes In Bloom for many years, Cabinet member Cllr Bob Callison, along with Leader Cllr Oliver Freeston and others, started work on the flyover planters earlier this week.
“Of course, real displays would have been fantastic, but there was no way we wanted to add to water shortages and the cost of keeping more displays alive was simply not an option.
“But we really wanted to do something that added a splash of colour to welcome drivers as they were coming into Grimsby and Cleethorpes – and these have done the trick,” said Cllr Callison.
“This was real partnership working too, we all got together to do this,” he added.
In the coming weeks and months, Cllr Callison said how we would like to work together with different organisations, companies and all councillors to see what more can be done to make a difference – not only on main roads into the borough, but within communities right across the borough.
He added: “Brightening up the flyover is clearly just a very small thing and been done with a very small budget as a stop gap. But what it does show is that we can come up with ways of doing things if we work together.
“Over the next few weeks, I am going to be contacting fellow councillors, and others, to start looking at how we can all unite to smarten areas up, to look at things like alley clearance again – and to make us all proud of where we live and what we do.”
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