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15th March 2010
The Heritage Lottery Fund has confirmed an award of £595,000 towards the restoration of Severndroog Castle. This is a major achievement, and a big step towards opening up the Castle once more to the public. Severndroog is one of seven historic sites and projects across London that have been awarded grants worth a total of £4.4m by the Heritage Lottery Fund.
The grant will cover about 70% of the full cost restoring and opening up access to the Castle. There is still plenty of hard work to be done to meet the full target of £840,000 needed to complete all the work. We are confident that grant funding from a number of other organisations and significant support from Greenwich Council will help us to reach our target.
And YOU can help too! Help to get the Castle open by sponsoring a brick!
What is going to happen at Severndroog?
We want to revive the public spirit of those people who, nearly a century ago, put their effort and passion into making the Castle a loved and cared-for building, open to the whole community. The Trust intends to restore Severndroog Castle and open it up again for people to enjoy and participate in this rich and valuable heritage.
We will re-open a café/tea room on the ground floor. We have had visitors to Open House weekends who remember using the old tea room in their younger days, and look forward to being the first visitors once it is open again.
We will restore the elegant first floor room and make this a focus for functions, events, exhibitions, history talks, and guided tours.
We will restore the second floor room as a multi-functional space for activities and visits including educational visits, ecology and nature watch activities, exhibitions, interpretation, history talks and other activity programmes. One of the Turret rooms will be used to for the administrative and office functions for the building.
The viewing platform on the roof will be renovated and the roof made secure and safe. The Castle stands 30ft higher than the cross at the top of St Paul’s Cathedral, and the views from the roof are spectacular - and on a clear day it is possible to see features in seven counties.
The view from the top is a big attraction for visitors. As one young visitor put it: “It’s not the biggest castle I’ve been in, but it has the best views!”
We will recruit, train and support a team of volunteers to enable the Castle to be used and enjoyed by the public. We will work with local schools and community groups to develop educational and other activities focused on the building, its history, the people associated with it, and the natural environment of ancient woodland surrounding it.
We will work with other local cultural, educational and community organisations to make the Castle known and to link in with other programmes and activities in the area. These will include museums and heritage centres - such as the National Maritime Museum and the Greenwich Heritage Centre - the University of Greenwich, and local schools and further educational colleges. We ensure Castle has a place in activities on the Green Chain Walk, and will work to include the Castle and the activities within the Greenwich’s Olympic Legacy plans.
By doing this we will enable people from a wide range of backgrounds to enjoy and learn about the Castle and the surrounding woodlands, and to be active participants in events and activities at the Castle. Our plans aim to remove barriers – physical, intellectual, and cultural – to enable people get to know the Castle and its story.
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SCBPT has been awarded a Certificate of Excellence from the 2009 London in Bloom competition |
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