Fundraising - Broomfield House Restoration

Background to the funding problem

Fundraising is the main priority which the Trust and Council and other interested bodies including Historic England continue to address as the Broomfield House Partnership Board. The most significant step taken by the Trust, Friends of Broomfield Park and Council took was preparing and submitting a detailed proposal to the Lottery Heritage Fund (HLF). The proposal was submitted on 22nd October 2012. It was hoped that somewhere in the region of £4million could be secured from the HLF.

Under this plan, an additional £2 million or so would have had to be raised from other sources in order to secure the success of the project. The project management team talked to experts and while recognising that this was a challenging target, they believed it was achievable.

Council officers and representatives of the Broomfield House Working Group met with Heritage Lottery Fund officers on the 5th March 2013 to discover what happened when the National Memorial Fund board discussed our joint bid. The good news was that the officers’ report recommended a first round pass for the £4.175M and an award of £0.296M to develop the project. The bad news was that the board was unable to agree.

On the day they met to consider our bid there were ten new projects to evaluate and £12m available and in the event only four of the projects were awarded funding. None of the projects were as challenging as ours, so risk was a factor in the board’s judgement. Our bid had strong heritage and community attributes and the HLF commented positively on the close working relationship between the Working Group and the Council. Encouragingly, the board were interested in a better understanding of the master plan for the House, Park and Stable Yard, which was not actually required to be developed in the initial bid, though we had noted our intentions to develop this in later stages.

Subsequently we were encouraged to bid to the London HLF committee, but though this might have had a greater chance of success as a local scheme, it would have been for less capital than the original bid because the London Committee had a £2m ceiling for grants.

Such a bid would need to explain in more detail how we see Broomfield House fitting in to the proposed wider Park bid, and in particular with the Stable Yard. In addition, the proposed bid would have been under the Enterprise scheme which required engagement of a commercial partner at the outset, rather than at a later stage of the Heritage scheme.  We had understood these to be later requirements, using the development grant proposed in the staff evaluation.

Much preparatory work was commissioned including the production of a Conservation Management Plan (see the "Documents" tab for some of this), and exploration of setting up a managing Trust for the project. A number of studies have been done in to various ways of involving commercial partners.

Current position
Unfortunately the HLF has been revising its own funding situation and at the moment it is unclear exactly how much funding might be available and under what conditions. Nevertheless the Council as owners are about to seek offers from commercial sources for restoring, running Broomfield House and stableyard. However, The Trust remains tied by it registered charitable objectives to solutions which clearly benefit community access and use.

Can you help?
If you have fundraising skills, and are interested in supporting the fundraising initiatives for this project on a voluntary basis then please get in touch. All donations can be gift-aided and will go directly to the Broomfield House Trust which is a registered charity.

We are also now part of the Amazon Smile charitable giving scheme. Under this, if you buy from Amazon choose us as the Smile beneficiary, 0.5% of any qualifying spending goes to the Trust – it costs you nothing.