Image: The Strand Arts Centre - National Lottery Heritage Fund
From Edinburgh to Belfast, seven at-risk heritage buildings will be transformed into community spaces for music, art, and social support through £27m of lottery funding.
Seven heritage projects spread across the UK are to share £27m in funding, newly announced by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
A restored Greek-revivalist school in Edinburgh, a new home for young musicians in Sheffield, a listed water tower in Colchester, and a repurposed studio once used by Dame Barbara Hepworth are among the projects to be backed.
A new Edinburgh venue for music and culture
In Edinburgh, the Old Royal High School is to received £5m. Part of Edinburgh’s UNESCO World Heritage Site, the building was designed by Greek-revivalist architect Thomas Hamilton and built in the 1820’s.
Formerly home to the Royal High School, one of the oldest schools in Scotland, the building has now been vacant and at risk for over 50 years since the relocation of the school. Its restoration is hoped to create a new venue to improve music and culture in Scotland’s capital.
A new space for young musicians in Sheffield
A further £4.7M will support the restoration of the Grade II* Listed Canada House in Castlegate. It will become the new home for Sheffield Music Academy and Sheffield Hub, as well as a base for many organisations, including Brass Bands England, Music in the Round, Choir with No Name, Orchestras for All and Concerteenies, while also supporting the University of Sheffield’s music department and The Sheffield College.
Originally built in 1875 as offices for the Sheffield United Gas Light Company, the building is set to be transformed into a new home for young musicians called Harmony Works.
Restoration of the currently unused building will offer a range of practice, rehearsal, and performance spaces and facilities that are not available in a single location elsewhere in the region.
New public access to Colchester’s ‘Jumbo’ water tower
The largest recipient in this round of funding, Colchester’s last intact listed water tower, affectionately known ‘Jumbo’, is to be restored.
The 131ft tall Grade II* Listed tower was originally constructed using 1.2m locally produced bricks. The £8m grant award will support a project making it accessible to the public for the first time as a heritage and events space.
Another life for a former studio and cinema in Cornwall
In Cornwall, a former cinema and studio which has been closed to the public for 65 years is set to be restored.
The Palais de Danse in St Ives has been awarded £2.8m to open the building for the community and visitors to Grade II* Listed, it retains features from its former uses as a cinema and dance hall in the early 1900s and its time as Dame Barbara Hepworth’s second studio between 1961 and 1975.
The project will create an immersive recreation of the artist’s workshop spaces alongside areas for ‘making’. The Palais was given to Tate by members of the artist’s family in 2015, with a covenant protecting three elements, which this project will preserve: the floor for the armature of Hepworth’s Single Form, the 24m long maple sprung dance hall floor, and a set of glassine doors designed by Hepworth.
Preliminary designs for the new space were revealed last August.
Tate St Ives unveils preliminary designs for Barbara Hepworth’s former Studio
A Grade II* Listed hall renovated to help tackle youth homelessness
Bristol’s Grade II* Listed Kingsley Hall, which sits in the city’s Old Market, will be receiving funding of £4.7m. Surrounded by 60 other listed buildings, it will be renovated, giving the youth homelessness charity 1625 Independent People a space to help young people at risk of homelessness to develop new skills and opportunities for employment.
Restoring the birthplace of art therapy in Chichester
The former Marchwell Stables of the West Sussex County Asylum, later renamed Graylingwell Hospital, Chichester is to be resoted with the help of a £1.3m grant.
The building is though to be the birthplace of art therapy, and The Marchwell Studios project will create “affordable and accessible creative and makers spaces, including five studios to support startups, full sized studios to help established creatives, workshop space for youth and community training programmes, and a community training studio protecting at-risk crafts and skills to promote wellbeing and mental health”.
Restoring Northern Ireland’s last remaining art deco cinema
Ninety years after first opening, work is underway to redevelop Strand Cinema, Northern Ireland’s last remaining art deco picture house. A £768K grant award to Belfast City Council is hoped to allow picture house to continue to be seen and used by people across Northern Ireland.
Eilish McGuinness, Chief Executive, The National Lottery Heritage Fund, said: “It is wonderful to start the New Year investing in projects that are saving heritage treasures across the UK, with decades of shared memories these exceptional buildings will be repurposed for the 21st century at the centre of communities and places.”
