Grand Opening of Neighbourhood Centre

SATURDAY 6th November 2010

Margaret Carney, Chief Executive of Sefton MBC came to officially open the refurbished Neighbourhood centre. Also attending was Joe Benton, MP for Bootle,along with many invited guests from local business, Sefton Council departments, Sefton CVS and the teams of professionals who have so ably helped us to create the wonderful transformation of this iconic Grade II Listed Building.

Eithne Brown, the renowed Liverpool actress,  compered the opening and this was followed with Margaret Carney cutting the ribbon on the ground floor and Jamie Burdekin, our local paralympic tennis player, cut the ribbon on the first floor. People were then able to tour the building to see the fantastic facilities available, to be used by the local community and business.

Come and join us to celebrate this incredible transformation.

Lift area on 1st floor	Games Hall

It’s all happening at Linacre Mission

Last year Linacre Methodist Mission was awarded a Community Buildings Lottery Grant and together with Grants from the European Regional Development Fund and a number of Charitable Trusts, plus donations, has raised a total of £900,000. With this money Linacre Mission has just completed a major refurbishment of the rear of the premises to provide a new Neighbourhood Centre. The entrance is in Bowden Street. 

The Games Hall (see photo) has been completely renovated with new flooring providing a light, bright, multi-purpose space for sport and youth activities. The lunch club room and the ground floor rooms and hall have all been modernised with new ceilings, decoration, lighting etc. Together with newly created social enterprise space and meeting rooms, the centre provides first class community facilities right at the heart of our neighbourhood.

Lifts have been installed giving full disabled access to the one hundred and five year old listed building. Jamie Burdekin, the local paralympic tennis star, visited the new centre last month, a few days after he returned from Montreal having won the Canadian Open Wheelchair Championships. He was delighted to be able to try out the new lifts, accessing the Games Hall and Youth Centre himself. It turned out that his grandparents Charlie and Edith Nelson used to belong to Linacre Mission and Jamie said how special it would be for him to be able to bring his own son to the children’s sports activities there in the future.

Please see our 'What's on' page for details of all the activites that take place during the week.