Privacy Policy for Mycenae Gardens

Last updated: 20 August 2026

Who we are

The Friends of Mycenae Gardens are a volunteer community group looking after Mycenae Gardens and the Woodland Dell in Westcombe Park, London SE3. We are not a registered charity. We are responsible for this website and for the personal information described below. You can reach us at friendsofmycenaegardens@gmail.com.

The short version

We collect nothing about you unless you choose to send it. Reading this site leaves no trace that identifies you. If you fill in a form, we keep what you sent so we can reply and so the committee can see it has been dealt with, and we delete it when it is no longer needed.

Cookies and tracking

This site does not use cookies, and we do not track you. That is why you will not see a cookie consent banner. Specifically:

• We set no cookies, and no advertising or tracking scripts run on the site.
• We count page views with a cookieless analytics service (Vercel Web Analytics). It records aggregate figures such as which pages are visited, and cannot identify you.
• The Wildlife Spotter game saves your progress, your sightings and your nickname, in your own browser on your own device. It is cleared after 48 hours of inactivity, and you can remove it at any time by clearing your browser data. Nothing is sent to us unless you press submit.
• The map on our Visit page loads its background images from OpenStreetMap, a non-profit mapping project. Like any web request this shares your IP address with their servers. They set no cookies and do not track you. See the OpenStreetMap privacy policy.

When you send us a form

The site has several forms: contact, volunteering, event enquiries, tree adoption, wildlife records, the photo competition and anonymous feedback. When you send one:

• What you typed is emailed to our group address, which is a Gmail account read by committee members.
• A copy is recorded in the system we use to run the website, so the committee can see what has arrived and mark whether it has been answered. That record holds the same details you sent, nothing more.
• We use it to reply to you and to keep track of the request. We do not use it for marketing, and we never sell or share it.

Our lawful basis is legitimate interests: running a community group and answering the people who write to us. Where you give us something optional, such as a photograph for the competition, we rely on your consent, and you can withdraw it at any time.

The anonymous feedback form

The feedback form asks for no name, email or anything else that identifies you, and we cannot tell who sent a response. Please do not put personal details in your answers. If you would like a reply, use the contact form instead.

The photo competition

If you enter, we keep your name, email address, age category, your photograph and your consent to publish it, so we can judge the competition and credit you. Entries are reviewed by a committee member before anything appears on the site. Entrants under 18 should have a parent or guardian's agreement before entering.

The Wildlife Spotter game

When you submit a session, we receive the nickname you chose and the species you recorded, and these appear on the public leaderboard. Please choose a nickname that is not your full name. Ask us and we will remove any entry.

Donations and links to other sites

Donations are handled by Stripe on their own pages. We never see your card details. Links to other organisations, including Stripe and our social media pages, take you to services with their own privacy policies.

Who else handles this information

We use a small number of established services to run the site. They process information on our instructions:

• Vercel, which hosts the website
• Sanity, which stores the website's content and the records of forms sent to us
• Web3Forms, which passes form submissions to our email
• Google, which provides the group's Gmail account
• Stripe, which takes donations

How long we keep it

• Messages sent through a form: kept while we are dealing with them and for up to twelve months afterwards, then deleted.
• Photo competition entries: kept for the competition and for as long as we have your consent to use the photograph.
• Wildlife Spotter entries: kept as a record of what has been seen in the gardens. Ask and we will delete yours.
• Anonymous feedback: kept indefinitely, because it contains nothing that identifies anyone.

Your rights

You can ask us to show you what we hold about you, correct it, or delete it. You can withdraw consent at any time. Write to friendsofmycenaegardens@gmail.com and we will respond within a month.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Contact us

Changes to this notice

If we change how we handle information, we will update this page and the date at the top.