Client: Private
Location: Hertfordshire
Ecologist: Susan Deakin Ecology

Brief
Liz Lake Associates was one of a comprehensive team of design consultants who successfully guided The Grove hotel in Hertfordshire through the planning process. Part of our role was dealing with protected species – a vital operation affecting the progress of this major hotel and golf course development.

Approach
Our work involved negotiation with English Nature and local wildlife groups to agree a strategy during the planning and inquiry stage.

Outcome
A scheme was evolved to take care of protected species which included the construction of an artificial badger sett, as well as the exclusion of badgers from a main sett in a dried-up lake so that it could be restored as part of an historic landscape restoration. It also involved the capture of grass snakes and their removal to a new location prior to construction, the temporary exclusion of bats during building renovation, the conversion of former air-raid shelters to bat habitat, the placing of bat boxes in the grounds to attract regionally rare species for breeding, the translocation of valued grassland which will be managed through grazing by sheep and continual monitoring of protected species during construction.