Friends of Millhouses Park

Click HERE to read the full press release!

We will be meeting from 7 pm in the Mill Courtyard, be entertained by our own Pete Brown and the group in which he plays “The Brick Budgie”.

Have a look round the 1000 year old site, inside the old buildings, see plans and idea, meet the movers and shakers and, perhaps, a few surprises.

Heritage Lottery Fund have awarded us £50k to get the building secure and we have another £100k to raise to get the small building back into sustainable community use.

From 8 pm we will move over the road to the Robin Hood to socialise and mingle.

We have put in 3 years work to get this far and now we need the funders, politicians and Officers to see the community coming together so please do turn up and be seen. It does make a difference. If it tips it down with rain then bring an umbrella and good shoes – we will carry on.

Check out ‘The Mill’ page for the latest instalment of the history of our Mill Buildings! This month John Hill-Wilson focusses on the Mill during the time of the Black Death!

Click here to jump to The Mill pages – scroll down to see the history of the Mill Buildings – why not take the opportunity to brush up on your local history by reading the previous instalments???

Energy Share is a group run by British Gas, River Cottage and Friends of the Earth – we need as many people as possible to become supporters of the Energy Share group before June 30th – so get yourself to the website below and get registered!!!

Put the Mill back into Millhouses – click here: http://www.energyshare.com/millhouses-mill-buildings/widget.js

Click here for a PDF flyer that you can print out and give to all your friends: Energy Share Flyer

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/

Check out The Mill pages for the new episode in the story of our Mill! This month’s offering tells us all about Hallamshire under the Feudal System – a reminder of how we used to live before Sheffield became a city…

Click HERE for the new episode – why not catch up by reading the previous episodes of this fantastic story?