Glass-House Project Support
Last autumn we applied to Glass-House Community Led Design for consideration under their Project Support programme, for help with our mill buildings project. Glass-House is a charity which helps groups like ours realise their aspirations for community buildings, and assist them with design ideas and a long term vision. After an initial meeting, they encouraged us to apply for support in the form of a three day course.
We were accepted and our first meeting took place on site last November. Here the Glass-House team listened to our plans and looked at the buildings before going away to draw up a tailor made course for us.
We then had their professional help for a further two sessions. The first, led by Leo Care of Sheffield University School of Architecture, took us through the steps we need to take in projects like ours. This session was followed by a study tour of three very different community based buildings in Sheffield. This enabled us to cherry pick ideas and inspiration for our own project as well as highlighting the things that were obviously not going to work in our case. All the sample buildings had something in common with our own building and site, either in terms of their historic importance, or their situation, i.e. sitting within a park boundary – the community aspect being all-encompassing.
Having given us some time to digest these ideas, Leo then held a follow up workshop in which, through a series of exercises, he helped us to brainstorm ideas for the future of our mill buildings.
We all agreed that we finished the Glass-House course on a high, with ideas buzzing around our heads. During the last few months those ideas have matured and many of them have been put into action, most notably in the design for our brochure and with a historic timeline poster currently in development.
It is also with thanks to Glass-House that we have had the confidence to forge our partnership with Sheffield City Council, opening up opportunities for further restoration on the site. We have started with the small building but hope that we shall eventually have the whole site back into use and forming a vibrant heritage focus at the north end of our park.
A full report on the Glass-House project can be found here: Glasshouse Report
Many thanks to both Leo Care and Hannah Gibbs, our Project Support officer at Glass-House – http://www.theglasshouse.org.uk/
Friends of Millhouses Park 