Plans for a spring clean-up of litter has attracted hundreds of promises of support after mother-of-three Nanna Blomquist launched a Green Beings High Barnet community organisation to campaign for greater environmental awareness.

Barnet Council’s latest cost-cutting proposal is to end the long-standing practice of locking up gates to parks, gardens and car parks at nightfall.

Chipping Barnet is surrounded on three sides by Green Belt – virtually unspoiled open countryside from Hadley Wood in the east to Whitings Hill in the west and south along the valley of the Dollis Brook. Together with substantial areas of Metropolitan Open Land (such as Tudor Park), surviving farmland (such as the Whalebones estate), several attractive parks and many street trees, we are lucky to have so much greenery. It helps give our area its special identity.