Lansdown Hall and Gallery celebration

I feel surprising relief tonight as I look back at this special event to celebrate the completion of the third phase of regeneration works at Lansdown Hall. The town council who bought the building in 2009 invited the key funding bodies who gave grants for the building works as well as people who have been closely involved in guiding the project forward.

The council bought the building to save it from further deterioration as well as possible sale for private development and ever since I have been chair of the working group organising the project. Now I am no longer a councillor, I am pleased that my help is still wanted to bring it to completion, even though I cannot officially chair the group. We have already raised nearly £150,000 in external funding to match the council's contributions, but more is till required.

I took the picture as the event was nearing its end, with quite a few of the participants having already left. We organised guided tours around the building to explain the extensive works that have been implemented at different times over the last few years and everyone was very impressed and pleased to be able to see for themselves, especially town councillors who heard me banging on about the works for many years as the chair of the Finance committee.  I was particularly pleased by the comment today of Haydn, the longest serving town councillor, who said that when the council took the building on he was very worried about the financial implications as well as the strain on council resources, but how wonderful the building now was. I do believe it has become an important community resource and will be so for the town from now on.

It couldn't be such a good venue though without the members of the trust who run the building so well, mostly as volunteers. We organised the=is event together and I think it has set a mark down for how to collaborate effectively.

In this picture Camilla is sitting on the stage acting as coordinator of the event, and taking questions from the floor.  Nick Hurst who sits beside her is the architect for the whole project and he has just retired, but will still be involved because he cares about the building so much.  Standing on the right is Jeremy C. who has been the chair of the trust running the building so well, another volunteer.  We have all worked very closely together with many others and I hope to carry on doing so.

The windows on the left hand side wall have been replaced with wholly new double-glazed units in purpose-built stainless steel frames designed to support the stonework around the windows. Nick's design has been a huge success and the improvement to the light coming in, the views out across Bank Gardens to the church and the heat saving has been wonderful.  The Cotswold stone rose window has been repaired and strengthened funded by a special event where Julia Donaldson, the author of 'the Gruffalo' childrens' books put on a show event to raise funds. How kind of her.  We will need a few more fund raising events but the end is in sight.  But we have just heard last week that the Gloucestershire Environmental Trust (GET) has awarded us a further £10,000 to do the windows on the right hand side of the hall in the next couple of months!