CEI Services staff and hundreds, if not thousands of Cockermouth residents use the railway bridge to access the town, the park and many other locations. It is a busy, high footfall area that looked completely different 5 years ago to how it looks now!
It used to be a place people could stop to admire the beautiful views up and down the river, have a picnic or pick berries. It is now fairly disgusting with shocking levels of graffiti and vandalism causing some people to stop using it altogether for fear of who they may encounter as they walk over it. As well as the graffiti it is overgrown with moss and weeds and generally covered in dirt and mud. All the metalwork needs also needs repainting!!
Having approached our local council with a plan of action for this area we await their response! I fear we may wait for some time though so thankfully the local press arranged to meet some residents who are particularly bothered by the areas current condition, so they could run a story in this weeks papers. Check out the article, it should be out in this Fridays local press!
CEI have proposed to work with the council to ensure the area is restored cost effectively and managed properly in the future, we want this area to be restored we are not interested in making lots of money from doing so. We have offered to use our graffiti and vandalism management experience free of charge for 6 months to prove to the council that the area doesnt have to be neglected for years then cleaned, then neglected etc etc. We are extremely confident we can make it a place to be proud of once again! We have even suggested to the council innovative ways in which we can fund the works! I hope they listen and at least speak to us about it. Most of all we hope the area gets cleaned up and we don't mind who ends up doing it really!
As you can see from our photos the area is in a real mess! Contact the council and share your view, it could help to get the issue sorted sooner!
The CEI Services family is packed full with talented, creative people and in the past few days we have come up with something which we hope will work out well so we can use it on a bigger scale in the future to promote ourselves. CEI Services is very focused on the environment, we are already working on ways to improve equipment efficiency and ways to use more recycled water on our jobs. We monitor our carbon footprint and take all measures to reduce it where possible. We are also investigating alternatives to using water, which are currently very expensive but hopefully in the coming months and years will become more affordable. The photos below show one of the methods we are going to use to try to promote ourselves using moss! We mix moss with some secret ingredients to form a kind of paste:
We then use recycled cardboard to make a stencil, in this case simply CEI, and paint on our mixture to leave what at first looks like a pile of mud, but what in time will turn back into vibrant green moss and look stunning in it's natural surroundings.
These photos are all taken within a couple of days of the moss being applied to the surface so please keep checking back to see the progress of the lettering. You will soon see efforts on a much larger scale!!!