Briardale House community centre in Blyth can refurbish bathrooms after fundraising target met

The management team at Briardale House in Blyth have been sequentially making improvements to the building in recent years, with a bathroom refurb their latest target.

A £1,000 grant from property developer The Banks Group’s community fund has helped the centre over its fundraising target.

As well as the 20-year-old bathrooms being fully redecorated, new lighting will be installed to brighten them up.

Centre manager Candice Randall said: “We have been progressively making changes and improvements across the centre in the last few years and while we have always kept the bathrooms clean and tidy, it was increasingly clear that we needed to brighten them up to bring them more in line with the rest of the building.

“We had a great response to our campaign and we are ready to get on with a project that will make a big difference to visitors’ experience of the centre.

“We try to keep user costs as low as possible to make the centre accessible to all, but with lots of plans for improving what we offer in place and plenty of different daily calls on the resources that we do have, it can be hard to balance our budgets with our ambitions to give our community the very best facilities that we can.

“We would not have been able to get as much done on this project as we wanted to without this latest Banks Group grant and we are hugely grateful for their continuing support.”

Jamilah Hassan, community manager at The Banks Group, added: “The Briardale House team, and the events and activities they host, make such a positive difference to so many different groups of local people and we are really pleased to be helping them get on with this latest project.”

This is the community centre’s second grant from the Banks Group after a £7,800 donation in 2022 helped to set up a new fire alarm system.

The centre and its grounds, which include an accessible patio, sensory garden, a summerhouse, and community allotments, are used by roughly 300 people every week for dozens of activities, classes, and community organisation meetings.