A MEMORIAL garden in honour of York community campaigner Keith Chapman is among projects to be supported by City of York Council.

Forgotten Corners is a council project set up earlier this year to help transform neglected green areas. The council asked groups and campaigners to bid for funds, with the aim to provide £100,000 to causes around the city.

Twenty-five projects have been granted funding, among them the Nunnery Area Residents Association, which applied for £2,000 under the scheme to go towards setting up the Keith Chapman Memorial Garden.

Elin Hullis, current chair of the residents association, said Mr Chapman - who died in January - had been a community champion and former chairman who would have been humbled but proud of the announcement.

She said: “I’m ecstatic. Keith was just highly community focussed and was on a lot of panels in York to make it a better place to live and when he passed, we wanted to do something as a proper memorial so he wouldn’t be forgotten.

“It’s fantastic news, and good for the community as well. We have had a few antisocial issues round here recently that the police and council have been very much involved in so to have something positive like this is really going to lift us.”

Elin said work on the garden was expected to start in the new year, to coincide with the anniversary of Mr Chapman’s death, and said she was “sure he would have been humbled about this, asking why we would do this for him”, but “he would love this”.

Other projects to receive funding include community gardens in Alma Grove, Ascot Way, St Hilda’s Church and Holgate Methodist Church, planters in Wellington Street, Knavesmire Rose Garden and St Georges Place, an accessible footway in Danesmead Wood, and Bootham Rest Garden, a pond and wildlife habitat by Clifton Green Primary School at Clifton Wood.

Funds were also granted for a York Bike Belles Mural creation on the Foss Islands Pathway, Millennium Wood Woodland maintenance, improvement to the lawn at York Explore.