The Friends of Windmill Gardens (FoWG), who run Brixton Windmill, have launched an online petition to save the education project at the mill. Continue to read to find a link to the online petition.
You can sign the petition here.
They urgently need to persuade Lambeth Council not to delay its plans for a new building in Windmill Gardens, so that the education programme does not grind to a halt in Brixton Windmill’s bicentenary year.
Brixton Windmill will be 200 years old in 2016. It is a Heritage Partner and you can read more about the history of the mill on our website here. Since being open to the public in the summer months following a Heritage Lottery Fund grant that helped with restoration in 2010-11, the Friends of Windmill Gardens have offered free tours and introduced more than 2,800 local children to a variety of windmill and local history-related topics.
The HLF grant has now run out, and the FoWG have put together a business plan outlining schemes to generate income. This included opening a modest new building in Windmill Gardens, on a site where a previous visitor centre once stood.
This would provide space to expand the education programme, store grain to mill flour, and host workshops, exhibitions and other meetings. Of these, the most urgent is the education programme, as the post of the education officer will end on 31 December 2015.
Now the future of the project, and of the education programme itself, are threatened by a proposal by Lambeth Council officers to withhold money which was agreed in January 2015 to pay for the new building. They are calling for further feasibility studies – to which no date is attached.
The Friends of Windmill Gardens are asking people to sign the petition to ensure the building goes ahead without delays so that their education programme can continue.
They need to get as many signatures as possible before Lambeth Council next meet on Wednesday 18th November.