BBC to move Blue Peter garden to Manchester
This article simply moans about the relocation of a key element of the Blue Peter armoury to Manchesrter. Don’t knock it. On a serious note we have lost many things which connect young people to gardening, food and the pleasures of managing the environment. I have reflected previously on the need to re-invent the teaching of rural studies as something with a new spin (when I was at school it was seen as a fall back for less bright kids) which speaks to the enthusiasm we now regularly demonstrate for allotments, local produce and the great outdoors. Blue Peter is a very influential means of making inroads into a certain cohort of the viewing public and therefore the garden is important. We also need however to widen the prosletysing about the importance of rural England, it’s land based nature, local food and the great outdoors to all sections of society through the TV and it would be very interesting to debate how best to do that.