"We've fallen in love with Sheffield's parks and its our mission to visit them all"

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Two best friends from Sheffield have turned their love for the city’s green spaces into a social media community like no other.

Jenni Sayer, aged 38, and bestie Laura Appleby, 40, are on a mission to visit every single park and green space in the city. During the festive period this year, the pair have been sharing their favourites in an advent calendar-style series of social media posts.

Mum-of-one Jenni said: “We have been to about 200 parks and we wanted to pull out some of our favourites across the city that we can celebrate over the advent period.”

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Jenni and Laura are the duo behind the increasingly popular Sheffield Park Project. The pair began the project in 2017 with the aim of visiting every park and green space in the Steel City.

Jenni (left) and Laura are trying to visit every park and green space as part of the Sheffield Park Project.Jenni (left) and Laura are trying to visit every park and green space as part of the Sheffield Park Project.
Jenni (left) and Laura are trying to visit every park and green space as part of the Sheffield Park Project. | Dean Atkins

“We both have children now and ended up spending lots of time in the pub and we thought lets do something outside the pub,” Jenni said. “I said something about their being 85 parks in the city and we would try to visit them all.”

Quickly, Jenni and Laura discovered 85 parks was a significant underestimate, and with more and more green spaces popping up as the city expands, they now have over 400 locations on their Sheffield Park Project map.

The Sheffield Park Project has built-up quite the local following, with nearly 3,000 followers on X (formerly Twitter), 1,400 followers on Facebook and now over 100 followers on a newly launched BlueSky account.

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The pair's most recent addition to the SPP Advent Countdown is Norfolk Heritage Park.The pair's most recent addition to the SPP Advent Countdown is Norfolk Heritage Park.
The pair's most recent addition to the SPP Advent Countdown is Norfolk Heritage Park. | Dean Atkins

During the festive period in 2024, Jenni and Laura have begun the SPP Advent Countdown - sharing snippets of information about their favourite green spaces in the run-up to Christmas.

Jenni said: “We have all this data and this information about the parks and we thought this would be a really nice way to get that info out there.”

One of the spaces they’ve shared is the Devon Gardens in Burngreave, which Jenni said has a “lovely little bit of history”. It was once know as Nanny Park, due to it being a popular place for nannies to bring children when the space opened in 1914.

The pair still have a number of Sheffield parks to document and haven’t yet managed to get to all the locations on the ever-expanding list, but they are determined.

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“We want to visit them all,” Jenni said, “We’ve visited all the major parks now. Now we’re mapping up the smaller ones and new ones.”

The Star’s #LoveYour campaign celebrates what Sheffielders love about our city and what makes it special.

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