Belper Civic Forum

VISION DOCUMENT

An historic former school is outlined for development under a charitable trust to become a combined community and business centre.

Belper Civic Forum is proposing to take over and maintain the former Herbert Strutt Primary School building, in Derby Road, Belper, and form a new independent charitable development trust to continue to run it.

The trust would run the former school buildings on a non-profit basis to benefit the local community, maintain the buildings for future generations and provide a site for businesses.

Derbyshire County Council was given the buildings by Herbert Strutt in 1909 and used them as a school until February this year when pupils and staff transferred to a new £3.7 million state-of-the-art building off Bargate Road. The terms of the gift were open to interpretation as to whether the county council or Amber Valley Borough Council were the residual trustees after the premises ceased to be used as a school.

Derbyshire County Council has been working in partnership with Amber Valley Borough Council to find potential future uses for the buildings.

A feasibility study, commissioned by the Belper and Milford Townscape Heritage Initiative, earmarked the site for community and business use.

Belper Civic Forum has developed proposals to run the building, under lease from Derbyshire County Council, until they set up the new trust. More detailed plans for the site’s future use as a community and business centre would then be developed.

Councillor John Williams, leader of Derbyshire County Council, said: “The former Herbert Strutt Primary School site is an historic site which we would like to see preserved and maintained so it continues to serve the people of Belper.

“We have carefully considered the available options with our partners and closely examined the feasibility study and forum’s proposals so we can safeguard the future of the buildings and make sure they continue to have a role in the community.”

Councillor Stuart Bradford, leader of Amber Valley Borough Council, said: “I know the Belper borough councillors wholeheartedly support these proposals, so we will be supporting the recommendations to our council meeting on 5 November, giving officers the authority to execute the legal documents necessary to give effect to these proposals.”

Janet Honey, chair of Belper Civic Forum, said: “This is a really exciting outcome to a lot of work developing our ideas for the future of the building.

“We would like to thank everybody who contributed at our public meetings or signed the petition showing their support for our plans. The school is a much loved and valued listed building and is a wonderful asset for the town and hopefully it is now safe for the next 100 years.”

Details of the lease between Derbyshire County Council and Belper Civic Forum are being finalised and the agreement is expected to be signed shortly.

 The Inspector appointed by the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government has dismissed the appeal by Chevin Property against the decision of Amber Valley Borough Council not to allow redevelopment of the building. Chevin Property wanted to replace the building, which started life as a private school c.1830, by a three storey block containing 15 dwellings and build a further block of 4 dwellings.

The Belper Civic Forum campaigned  to protect this historic building within the World Heritage Site and are very pleased with the Inspector’s Report which makes very interesting reading and will provide useful information and precedent should similar applications arise again. For example, in response to the appellants case that decay to the building in recent years had reduced the opportunities for retention and repair the Inspector stated, “In my opinion this amounts to deliberate neglect”.

 The feasibility study on the future of the school building concluded that a mixed community and commercial use, as advocated by the Belper Civic Forum, was likely to be the best option from a financial point of view. It suggested that the scheme would be self financing provided the former car park was developed for housing. The Belper Civic Forum has responded to the associated consultation and our response can be viewed here.Response.The Forum met the County and Borough Councils on June 19th, in order to discuss its proposals and the way forward.

The preparation by Amber Valley Borough Council of the Development Brief for the Meadows Edge area in Belper has been delayed. As a consequence, the Belper Civic Forum has postponed its next members’ meeting (oringinally planned for 16th June 2008) until further notice.

The Civic Trust have created a new website.  www.civicsocieties.org.uk is online and starting to generate traffic.  You will now be able to access the latest news and information on its free public site - no passwords required!  Each Society has a dedicated page that it can upload information to.  There are also online resources and a growing range of information to benefit the Civic Societies movement.  If you haven’t already visited take the time now…

After a few months of consultation, discussion and general honing, Belper Civic Forum is proud to make available an alternative development brief for The Meadows Edge in downloadable form. Download it, read it and let the Forum know what you think…

Download the file using this link (the file is aproximately 7.7MB in size).

This file is in PDF format. You will need a viewer for the file that you can download and install for free:

• The Adobe Acrobat Reader can be Found Here (Aproximately 22.4MB in size).
• The “Foxit Reader” (for Windows) is a smaller and faster alternative that can be downloaded from here (Aproximately 2.1MB in size).

In order to provide more information about the Forum’s Herbert Strutt Project a special web page has been created. The future of the former school is proving to be a very hot topic in the town, over 1800 people have signed our petition to ask for it to be used for community purposes, in less than a month! In addition there is also a petition on the Prime Minister’s web site so that other people, such as former pupils, can make their opinions known. Go to http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Strutts-Belper/

The children and teachers finally left the old Herbert Strutt school building this morning. The story was covered by BBC East Midlands TV, including interviews with Belper Civic Forum about the future use of the site.  The Strutt School sub-group of the Forum decided this week to use the name “Strutts” for its project for the re-use of the building for mixed community and commercial use. A special web page is being prepared including an on-line petition. In the meantime volunteers will be out getting signatures in Belper on Saturdays March 1st and 8th. A further press release has been prepared that gives a lot more background to the issues.Press release 27th Feb o8