One of London’s largest landowners has outlined how it will improve the environment across its huge estate — and that landowner is Transport for London (TfL).

Almost a third of TfL’s 2,300 hectares of land is covered by vegetation, from the long linear wildlife strips along railways to plots of land that are unsuitable for development and are left as wildlife spaces, though to the network of major roads that TfL manages.

Understandably, many of these spaces are actively controlled to minimise their impact on transport services rather than to improve the environment. But there’s increasingly a much better understanding of how wildlife benefits society and that it’s possible to improve biodiversity rather than treating nature as a problem to be controlled.