Public Arclight Update - January 2023 

 

Dear friends and neighbours,

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Welcome to the first of our regular project updates on our plan to redevelop the Holy Trinity South Woodford church site. Our project is called "Arclight" - an arclight is a type of lamp which produces an extremely bright light by enabling electricity to jump, or arc, between two closely spaced conductors. As we see this project come to fruition we hope to see our church connecting with people in ways which are not currently possible, burning brightly and lighting up our community.

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If we haven't connected before, my name is Abi and I've been the vicar at Holy Trinity for three years. In amongst the trials and tribulations of the pandemic, I've really enjoyed getting involved in the community here. My husband, Simon and I love South Woodford. If you are not already familiar with Holy Trinity, you are more than welcome to come and explore the life of the church, to visit during the week when we're open for prayer and visitors, as well as our Sunday services and other community events.

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Project Arclight is a multi-year project to improve and update our facilities. We are aiming to redevelop the site to have a new and improved church hall, a playground/play space for children, a community café and housing. Please note that there is no plan to demolish the church building, although the project may include some internal reordering work. In terms of timelines, we are still at the project outset so there's a lot of uncertainty around what will happen and when. The plan will hopefully become clearer over the course of this year, but we currently have aspirations to begin construction around 2026 and we understand that projects of this nature typically take between one and two years to complete.

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We have already undertaken some preliminary background work, including meetings with representatives of local community groups and site users. At the end of 2022 we appointed our architects, Malcolm Fryer Architects, who will be working with us to deliver the project, and who will be partnering with Satish Jassal Architects on the housing elements of the scheme.

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We are now entering the analysis and design stage, which will involve more consultation with community representatives and site users, and the church family. This stage also includes feasibility studies, testing of ideas and an iterative process to establish what will work best. When we have design ideas to share we will invite the community at large to feed into these proposals prior to submitting our planning application. We look forward to sharing our ideas with you in the second half of this year!

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In terms of continuing ongoing communication, we intend to send update emails such as this around twice a year, or whenever we have major news to share. We will also put relevant information on our website at www.htsw.org.uk/arclight.

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If you know of others who would like to receive these emails, just send their name and email address to hello@htsw.org.uk and we will add them to our distribution list.  Likewise, if you would prefer not to receive any further Arclight updates, please just reply to this email with the word "Unsubscribe" and we will remove you from our distribution list.

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With my prayers and best wishes,

Abi Todd

Vicar, Holy Trinity South Woodford

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