The fine weather has brought out this year’s vandals.
Email from Ian Bushell 03/04/2022 to FoSCP and Countryside Team.
Sunday morning’s walk with Pat off to a bad start, not just the cold but mindless vandalism probably done on Saturday evening. As you can see from the pictures, some three lengths of the car park barrier, plus the posts, have been ripped up and used to start a fire just inside the reserve’s grounds. We also picked up some 40 or 50 metal N₂O chargers littered around and in the fire, one at least having exploded. The warm weather always brings out the vandals.
Ian
Email from Countryside Officer Ali Rasey 04/04/ 2022 to Ian Bushell.
Hello Ian,
How depressing. Would you mind reporting it to the police on 101 please. Many thanks.
Ali
The park is a local resource, a reserve for local wildlife and a place for children to play while their adults walk, think and recharge their batteries. Families come to picnic here and to learn how the natural world works. But every year, as the weather warms up, there is vandalism of one kind or another.
Please, report vandalism to the police if you see it. Somebody must have seen a party of people, probably young, probably noisy, probably high on laughing gas, pulling the car park fence apart and building a fire, probably on Saturday night. Please, don’t rush past thinking, “It’s none of my business,” because it is the business of everybody who uses and values the reserve.
Southwick Country Park Nature Reserve 
These vandals really are mindless, not to mention thoughtless and selfish!
I was annoyed walking across the fields from Blind Lane on Sunday morning, to notice some mindless morons have dumped an office chair in the Lambrok stream, torn the back from it and left the foam floating about in the stream. They must have done this on Saturday evening, as it wasn’t there on Saturday afternoon. These mindless morons obviously have no respect for wildlife or the countryside!
It’s a stage our children seem to go through. In all the years I have been associated with the reserve, there has always been a group of local youngsters doing some, usually smallish and easily repaired, damage. The personnel changes every year as the individuals grow out of their adolescent need to destroy things – but the group remains. Sometimes a really charismatic and imaginative leader emerges and then we do have a particularly worrying year with lots of monitoring and liaison with the police.