The Mountsorrel and Rothley Community Heritage Centre,
has now received planning permission to go ahead with its ambitious project to
build a heritage centre at Swithland Lane on the boundary of the two parishes. With
finance and planning permission in place the hunt is already underway for
suitable contractors to undertake the majority of the work.
The Heritage Centre will be constructed alongside the
restored Mountsorrel Railway at Nunckley Hill, close to the Halstead Road
junction and will be operated by an independent, not for profit company run by
the community for the community. The aim is for the heritage centre and other
attractions on the site to be free for the public to visit with a tea room
generating income to allow the site to operate.
The plan involves the rescue, relocation and restoration
of three old granite stone buildings, all of which have local importance and
their own history, but are either in a poor state of repair or at risk of being
lost. These will be relocated to Nunckley Hill to form the core of the heritage
centre and tea room.
The scheme has been made possible thanks to Lafarge
Tarmac who are providing the land required for the project, materials at prime
cost, as well as a grant of £540,000 through their Landfill Tax Credits scheme.
The remaining match funding has been provided by public donations and grants from
the Rothley History Society, Friends of the Great Central Main Line, the Garfield
Weston Foundation, the Harry Hames Cottage Charity, the Helen Jean Cope Charity
and the Edward Cadbury Charitable Trust.
The heritage centre will tell the interesting and varied
story of both Mountsorrel and Rothley’s history, which includes connections to
the abolition of the slavery movement, the Knights Templar and a castle built
by a nephew of William the Conqueror!
As well as the heritage centre and tea room, the scheme
also includes car parking, a half mile long “Nunckley Trail” nature path
through woodland, created by volunteers over the past 18 months, a railway
platform to allow visitors to ride heritage steam and diesel trains, which the
Great Central Railway will run along the branch line starting next year. There
will also be a quarry museum area providing a static recreation of how granite quarrying
took place in Mountsorrel at the end of the 19th century. This
involves the creation of replica stone built stone masons huts and railway
sidings for shunting demonstrations.
A future addition will be a railway museum building
housing historic railway vehicles that once worked at Mountsorrel quarry and an
exhibition room to tell the story of the geology of Charnwood Forest as well as
the history of quarrying at Mountsorrel. Funding is still required for these
two buildings but the planning permission includes their construction.
To comply with funding conditions the work is scheduled
to be completed by mid-summer 2015. To keep costs down, however, a substantial
portion of the work will be carried out by community volunteers and several
local companies have come on board to offer their advice, services and skills free
of charge to help the project succeed. These include Lafarge Tarmac, Edward
Hands & Lewis Solicitors, Ask Accounting, Languard Vegetation Management,
Palmer Smith Tax Services, D & d Building Services Consulting Engineers,
Kibworth Tax Services. The Rothley History Society, Mountsorrel Heritage Group
and Rothley Heritage Trust are all working closely with the project also.
Project Leader Steve Cramp commented “We have been overwhelmed by the response of local businesses and
individuals to our project, which continues to develop as more people hear what
we are doing and have achieved. To reconstruct the branch line, from Bond Lane,
Mountsorrel to Swithland sidings on the Great Central Railway, took us six
years and was a tremendous achievement. The heritage centre is an
equally ambitious project. We are very grateful to Lafarge Tarmac’s Landfill
Community Fund for providing the majority of the funding for the scheme and
also to the public and other charities and organisations that helped us to
raise the £56,000 match funding required to release the landfill grant. The
next 9 months are certainly going to be an exciting and busy time for our
volunteers. We need more help so if you would like to volunteer and get
involved, whether it be with physical work or with the many administration and
planning tasks, please get in touch”.
For further information, or to volunteer, then email
project leader Steve Cramp Vist the project website
If you would like to donate to the Exhibition and Museum
Building fund then please send cheques made payable to “DCRT” (David Clarke
Railway Trust) to 112 Balmoral Road, Mountsorrel,
Leicestershire LE12 7EW (Please
write ‘Heritage Centre’ on the reverse of cheques.)
