Have a look at the new park leaflet. It shows all about the changes that are happening this autumn. Find it under press and public relations. Happy Reading….

                                                                       

Press Release

26/04/2010

Embargoed until 0900 on 26/04/2010

EXERCISE, ART & PLAY IN VICTORIA PARK

£43,500 GRANT AWARDED TO THE FRIENDS OF VICTORIA PARK, STRETFORD

Park transformation this year enabled by Friends Group

The Friends of Victoria Park, Stretford have this week been awarded a grant of £43,500 from the Big Lottery Fund Community Spaces programme. The Grant will pay for a trim trail, a mural, mosaic stepping stones, balance beams, petanque court and another totem sculpture.

 The Trim Trail consists of eleven pieces of exercise equipment and an explanatory sign showing how to use it, placed around the park. This is expected to be used by adults and children alike to improve their fitness levels. We expect this trail to encourage people to exercise more and to enable the jogging route through the park to be a bit more fun, which we consider very important in these times of increased obesity.

The huge mural will be sited within the under 5′s play area and will run almost the entire length of the area. It will consist of 23 x 8ft wide wooden panels, each one being decorated by community groups and local schools. This mural will create a consistent boundary between the houses on Park Road and the under 5′s play area, hiding the unsightly and dangerous fencing.

The 30 mosaic stepping stones will have a wildlife theme and will be created with our artist Amanda McCrann and community groups, such as ASGMA and local teenagers. These stepping stones will guide people around the wildlife garden within the park and take them to a new wildlife information board that the grant will also fund. This will be a lovely community project and builds upon the success of our mosaic making days held last year which everyone seemed to enjoy.

In the under 5′s area some balance beams will be provide to encourage exercise and imaginative play for the children. These beams will be created by our favourite chainsaw artist Mick Burns and we are sure these will be well loved and well used.

Mick Burns will also be commissioned to create another of his trademark totem sculptures within the park as there is a tree that we have been wanting to do this on for a long time but we always run out of time and money. We don’t know at this time what the sculpture will be of but we know it will look stunning when it’s completed.

The Petanque Court or Boules Court will be sited in the bowling greens area of the park on an area that is currently under utilised. This area will have the court, a noticeboard with instructions on how to play, two beautiful benches [again carved by Mick Burns], and notices on the gates explaining how to access the area and where bowls and boules can be borrowed from. We hope that this will become a firm favourite with family and friends playing the game together.

The opening ceremony event is currently scheduled for Saturday 30th November and will combine with our Halloween party and lantern parade. We expect this event to be very exciting and fun. Due to this grant we will be able to offer free food and drinks and buy equipment that we need to run this and future events.

The last aspect of this grant enables us to print off 5000 leaflets that we will distribute around the area advertising the event and the changes we have been able to make.

As you can see this grant will enable a lot of people to be involved in improving the park and we hope it will lead to greater ownership of the park amongst the community and therefore less vandalism and antisocial behaviour.

 This grant entitled Exercise, Art & Play was put together by the Friends group to make a number of smaller projects that we wanted to happen more quickly in the park. ‘These smaller bid applications could have taken years to be granted and completed and so although it is riskier to put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak, it seemed worth a go.’ The whole process was quite quick and although there was a lot of work to do to complete the stage 2 application, stage 1 was relatively simple and helped to prepare you for the next stage. You are allocated a facilitator who helps with any problems and can guide you through the process. If you have a project you believe will enhance your local area and improve community lives in your area then it is definitely worth submitting an application to the fund at

www.community-spaces.org.uk.

 Shelly Quinton-Hulme the chairperson for this group and author of the grant bid applications is absolutely delighted.

This project will not only bring the community together in creating these new pieces of artwork for the park, but will also enable us to exercise and play together. The opening event planned for Halloween will be an amazing, again allowing everyone the opportunity to come together to celebrate our lovely park. I can’t wait to get started and am excited about every aspect of this project. The changes this grant will bring will be immediately noticeable within the park and pushes us further along in completing our strategy plan for the park.

-ENDS-

Notes to Editors

Friends of Victoria Park, Stretford

• We are a small, local community group who formed in 2002 to reverse the decline in our park. Since then we have gone from strength to strength and have completed many projects successfully and run many events throughout the year.

 

For further information contact:

Shelly Quinton-Hulme, Chairperson Friends of Victoria Park, Stretford – 07718287131

www.fovps.org.uk – recently updated website

shellyquinton@hotmail.com

Please always include the following standard boilerplates for Community Spaces, Groundwork UK and Big Lottery Fund.

Community Spaces

Community Spaces is a £50 million open grants programme that is managed by Groundwork UK as an award partner to the Big Lottery Fund’s Changing Spaces initiative. The programme helps community groups create or improve green and open spaces so that the quality of life in neighbourhoods across England is enhanced.

Only community groups in England are eligible to apply to Community Spaces – a full eligibility criteria is available at www.community-spaces.org.uk. The programme has been open for small and medium grants (£10,000 – £49,999) since March 2008 and will remain open for these sizes of grants until 2011.

 

Groundwork UK

Groundwork supports communities in need, working with partners to help improve the quality of people’s lives, their prospects and potential and the places where they live, work and play. Our vision is of a society of sustainable communities which are vibrant, healthy and safe, which respect the local and global environment and where individuals and enterprise prosper. For further information visit: www.groundwork.org.uk

 Big Lottery Fund

The Big Lottery Fund’s Changing Spaces programme was launched in November 2005 to help communities enjoy and improve their local environments. The programme is funding a range of activities from local food schemes and farmers markets, to education projects teaching people about the environment. Groundwork UK was appointed as a Changing Spaces award partner, responsible for distributing £50 million through its Community Spaces scheme. 

 The Big Lottery Fund, the largest of the National Lottery good cause distributors, has been rolling out grants to health, education, environment and charitable causes across the UK since its inception in June 2004. It was established by Parliament on 1 December 2006.

Big Lottery Fund Press Office: 020 7211 1888           Out of hours: 07867 500 572

Public enquiries line:                08454 102030               Textphone:    08456 021 659

 

Full details of the work of the Big Lottery Fund, its programmes and awards are available on the website: www.biglotteryfund.org.uk