Our largest project on the horizon is the Victoria Park Lodge building, for which VPAG are chasing funding to be able to turn it into a café and all-round community space. Please find the latest news, views and plans on the project here.
Good news comes to those who wait... After more than 18 months of work, a five-year plan has been drawn up that will see more than £3million being spent on improvements to Victoria Park, including the refurbishment of the Lodge. Please visit Latest News to find out all the exciting details for the café and community space.
VPAG has applied to Prohelp, an organisation of professionals that offers free assistance to community groups, for help with the lodge regeneration project. We have asked them if one of their members would carry out a structural survey on the property for us to establish its condition. We have also requested help with drawing up a business plan to determine the viability of the renovated building. All of this information will be vital when applying for funding.
We now have the first rough plans of how the lodge will look, available as a pdf. Have a look and let us know what you think!
The Victoria Park Action Group has applied to the National Lottery's Community Buildings Fund for a grant of £250, 000 to regenerate the Park Lodge.
The application was submitted on April 30th and we expect a reply before the end of August.
The bid follows consultations with an architect and quantity surveyor commissioned by VPAG. They have given us a clearer idea of how the building could be redesigned to meet our needs and how much the work will cost.
We now have an architect's drawing for the proposed scheme and we expect the total cost of the planned works to be somewhere between £500,000 and £600,000. This means that even if our bid to the Community Buildings Fund is successful, we will still need to raise around £350,000 ourselves. We are currently looking into ways of doing this.
If we hear in August that we have successfully passed Stage One of the application process, the Fund may decided to give us a development grant of up to £25,000. We would use this money to develop our plans further before proceeding to Stage Two of the application process.
We need to submit a Stage Two application within nine months of receiving Stage One approval, and the Fund will make a final decision within six months of our Stage Two application.
In the meantime we will start raising funds to pay for a structural survey of the building and for the preparation of a business plan to demonstrate the financial viability of the project.
If anyone has any fundraising suggestions or ideas, or wants to get involved with the project, please contact us.
VPAG has commissioned an architect and a quantity surveyor to provide costings for the refurbishment of the Lodge, which will be used as a basis for the Lottery application. They will be inspecting the Lodge on April 18th and reporting back with their figures before the end of the month.
It was decided at a VPAG meeting on April 2nd that the group would submit an application for Lottery funding of £250,000. The application has to be in by April 30, 2007, and Bristol City Council is working with us to put the bid together. VPAG will be instructing a quantity surveyor who will give us an idea of costs for a general refurbishment/conversion of the lodge into a café with kitchen and toilets and some community space. We intend this to be Phase One of a larger project which will eventually involve extending the building to provide more community facilities.