As you know from the last update the church is now publicly on the Heritage at Risk Register (HARR).  This story was covered in the local press at Cambs Times 7th November obviously without any knowledge of Elm Community Hub project.

A follow up story: Wisbech Standard 17th November was published yesterday after the paper and I spoke a few days ago. 

Readers should not be worried about the future of the church – this project is about protecting the church for its long-term future use; and a lot more!

The article used a lot of content from our website which includes many photos of other churches’ hub-like projects. There is a long section explaining the possible options from a document that RHP (our architects) presented to the church in October 2024. But none of these potential options are firm “plans” for All Saints’ church; they are imagined visualisations (with some notes on consequences) to act as thought provokers for the discussions and plans that are yet to come. All of this happened before the ECH project was even started earlier this year.

The true plans are yet to be prepared and considered by all those who have an interest.

The other key point to make is that the big 6 figure number of which I spoke is just the cost of effecting the immediate and urgent repairs to the church – not the creation of a hub inside it.

My message is that readers should not take away impression that a community hub is just around the corner, or that design work is advancing fast – sadly at this stage it really isn’t!!! 

Right now the committee is solely focused on getting funding to do the most urgent repairs to the church to stop it failing further (you may be aware that the flagpole on the tower fell causing damage at the weekend).  The design of a hub is something that cannot start in earnest until 2026, but we are very keen to get there.  When we do, there will be copious amounts of consultation and discussion before any decisions are made, and even then proposals will have to be put to the church authorities to seek their approval for permission to make any change.

It is good news that our story is now more public in a way that lines up with “we need to fix the church”; but we need to get that first repair project underway before we can spend time designing a “church hall replacement”.

It hasn’t been easy getting just to this point (there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye), but if we are successful with the imminent Lottery grant application we will soon see the first tranche of repairs begin, and then we will move quickly onto planning the remaining repairs and the plans for a community hub.