Welcome back!
A significant pause in the process has come to an end. There had been a slow down of progress as we got bogged down with not having our plans approved by English Heritage and also the struggle to find financial backing. Both of these were because we didn't really have any end users - other than saying we wanted to give the village a community space, the conservationists were reluctant to let us take the pews out until we had definite users. The same story came from grant making bodies. Reluctantly the Parochial Church Council said that they couldn't afford to just let the project run indefinitely, and set a deadline of Dec 2014 to finally close the building.
And that's when things happened!
The school then said - we're bursting at the seams, we need more space but can't expand on our site. AND we can afford to pay a decent rent to be major tenants all day, every school day! Suddenly we had our user, and the rest has been like a ball gathering speed as it rolls downhill.
We had an exciting first meeting of the year of Bemerton Community Ltd - Peter Webster stood down after many faithful years as chair - he is now focussing on this summer's George Herbert Festival, and yours truly was elected interim chair.
We are gathering support from school parents and will be hosting a series of meetings soon to let everyone know what is going on.
In the meantime, I'll try to keep the blog updated so you can know what is happening - spread the word!
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