Open House Festival: Shaftesbury Hall (Bowes Park)

Drop-in between 2pm and 4pm on Tuesday 16th and Sunday 21st September

North London Samaritans needed a new home

North London Samaritans is a small charity, affiliated to the main charity. We are entirely self supporting and in the past we had a shop in Whetstone which raised enough to cover our outgoings. We owned a house in Queens Road, Bounds Green and we owned a very run down old Tin Tabernacle, known as Shaftesbury Hall, which we only used for training and branch meetings.
When the shop was no longer able to raise enough money we had to close it and look for another source of income. We knew the house we were using needed some expensive repairs, and the Tin Tabernacle was very run down.
We looked at repairing the Hall and moving the branch there. The quote we got was very high and didn't cover unexpected items. We talked to builders and together we came up with a plan to demolish the Hall and build a centre for us and 3 flats, at their expense, one of which we would buy and rent out for income.
We were unable to get planning permission for this, or a couple of variations we tried to get approval for.
It was then decided we would rebuild the Hall to look the way it would have originally and use it as both a Branch for North London Samaritans and a Community Hub. Planning permission was granted in 2013.

Fundraising

We needed to raise £810,000 to complete the development of the site. We had already sold the house in Queens Road as we hoped a previous plan would be agreed, so we had some cash. However our branch was now operating from a flat very near the North Circular Road and we were paying rent each month out of our capital.
We approached Big Lottery for a grant under the Building Communities. We had to ask for an initial exemption as we weren't in one of the areas of deprivation they would usually consider. Fortunately we could show we were very close to one of these areas and this was agreed.
We moved on to a three part application which takes over a year to complete. When we had successfully completed the second stage we started looking at other funders and sending out applications.

Everything finally starts moving...

We had some hiccups along the way. We had squatters move into the Hall twice and we had to go to the High Court to evict them, which was very expensive. After the second time, we got the planning permission amended to allow us to remove the roof so that this didn't keep happening. We successfully got the Big Lottery grant and several other large grants and managed to change our Charitable status to CIO just in time to sign the contract with our chosen builders T & B (Contractors) Limited.
The build started by knocking down the existing structure in Feb 2018 and by October, North London Samaritans were in our new home and taking calls. The Hall opened shortly after that, and has been very popular with the local community and was even used as a food bank during Lockdown when we though we would have to close it completely.

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