Leila Taheri makes sure a London nature reserve is habitable for wildlife and safe for visitors. Now it’s her turn to be looked after
Leila Taheri used to go to the Welsh Harp wetlands in north-west London when she was a schoolgirl. “At the time,” she says, “it was a bit of a dump, and dangerous.” She’d occasionally play rounders there, but it wasn’t somewhere you wanted to linger. During the first lockdown in 2020, she rediscovered it. “Before then,” says Taheri, who is 37 and works in advertising, “it was just a place I lived near and visited periodically. But during lockdown, I grew to really care about this space. And when you care about something, you celebrate it.”
The Welsh Harp is a 160-hectare (340-acre) nature reserve and site of special scientific interest around Brent reservoir. It’s home to bullfinches, wrens, jays, greenfinches and willow warblers, but also a lot of litter. “There were decades of rubbish in the water,” says Taheri. “We’re talking trolleys,birdcages, cones.” In August 2020, Taheri WhatsApped her neighbours and asked them to join a litter pick: 25 people turned up and collected 68 bags of rubbish.
