Bridport: Joy as £1.4m revamp of town hall receives green light (From Bridport and Lyme Regis News)

Bridport: Joy as £1.4m revamp of town hall receives green light

10:04am Thursday 10th December 2009

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A 12-year battle to remodel Bridport’s town hall is over following a successful bid for a £600,000 Heritage Lottery grant.

With £400,00 from the town council’s reserves the way is now open for the £1.4 million project to open it for more community use.

The aim is to restore the hall and make it fully accessible with a new ground floor community space.

Dorset County Council and West Dorset District Council are also helping to fund the work and the district council will pay for relocating the town hall toilets to the South Street car park.

Excited Dave Rickard, leader of Bridport Town Council, said: “This is an important and historic building and it is great that we now have an opportunity to make it fully accessible, more user friendly and more energy efficient.”

Town councillor Charles Wild, who was council leader when the first stage grant application was submitted, said: “Congratulations to project manager Crystal Johnson and the town council officers. “The town council has worked hard on this over a number of years and to win this sort of grant in a highly competitive field is a great achievement.”

Bob Gillis, Bridport Town Clerk added: “The town hall has an important place in the history of Bridport and this project has been a long standing aspiration of the town council.

“The development of the project has shown the level of public support for this exciting scheme.

“As well as the physical work on the building, there will be an opportunity to involve people, and particularly young people, in a range of activities to appreciate the history and tradition of this fine building.

“The Fra Newbery Exhibition of 2008, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, brought the town hall interior into regional and national focus and was well supported by the public.

“Many people attending that exhibition and subsequent events asked why the town hall could not be open more and we now have that chance to put the building back at the very heart of civic and community life in Bridport.”

Coun David Tett paid tribute to the people who started the process more than a decade ago. He said: “This is the news the town has been waiting many years for. It was in 1997 when David Pugh was town clerk and Brian Rowe was mayor that the wheels were first set in motion, and we are indebted to those persons, as we are to those who took up the challenge following refusal of the first grant application.

“This is a facility that we have been lacking, a venue to cater for 200-plus people for a variety of things and activities. If you keep at a thing, then you will win through in the end.”

l Work is due to start in the spring and be completed by 2011.

There is a substantial amount of structural work that needs to be undertaken in order to conserve the building.

The Town Hall project will provide a level access from Bucky Doo Square with a lift to the first floor.

It is also hoped that the tourism information centre will relocate to the ground floor space, although this remains to be confirmed by West Dorset District Council.

Based on feedback the town council will be improving the facilities on offer, including the heating, lighting, acoustics, kitchen and IT provision. A new community space will be created at the southern end of the ground floor.

As well as the physical work, there will be a whole programme of community-based projects and activities.

These include an oral history project to research and document local memories of the building, a young people’s project looking at Bridport today and links with schools and community groups to explore the heritage of the building.

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