Category: refurbishment

Wonderful news! We have just been awarded a very generous grant of £15,000 by the Congregational and General Charitable Trust for our refurbishment project, for which we are very grateful indeed. This is a great start to our fund-raising. With the money already raised by the church, this leaves £66,000 still to raise.

We have just heard that our grant application to the Garfield Weston Anniversary Fund was not successful. So it is time to start working hard on finding other sources of funding. We are putting together a list of bodies that provide grants of various sizes for this kind of work. Making grant applications seems to…

Sorry for the lack of updates on our refurbishment project. Quite a lot has been happening over the last six months.

Today we received our Certificate of Authorisation! Praise God! It has been a long and bumpy road to this point, so it is a matter of great relief that we now have our plans approved and can get on with the next stage, which is put the work out to tender and get some quotations.

We have been thinking hard about how to respond to the objections to our refurbishment scheme and what we can do to move forwards. We have reluctantly come to the conclusion that if we do not agree to retain the rearmost three rows of pews then the refurbishment simply will not happen.

Very disappointing news regarding our listed building application, I am afraid. We heard a couple of days ago that the Listed Buildings Advisory Committee have decided not to approve our application as it stands.

The formal application to the Listed Buildings Advisory Committee went off today, including a full 25 copies on CD ROM! The next stage is the 28 day public consultation period, which they will kick off as soon as they process our application.

It’s been a quiet few months, but we’ve finally heard back from the BU Listed Buildings Committee. There are a few details that they want added to our application, but once we have done that they are happy for us to make the formal application. So we’re getting there. One final push and we should…

A quick update on our building project. We have received a grant of £1000 from the Baptist Union Home Mission Fund to use to replace the cooker in our church kitchen.

Today we reached the first milestone of our journey towards refurbishing the church buildings with the submission of our draft application to the Listed Buildings Advisory Committee of the Baptist Union.