The Skainos Project

On Wednesday 19 November demolition began on the row of shops in front of the Mission. Whilst this is not part of the Skainos development it is a familiar and long-standing feature on the street which has now disappeared, because by Friday the site was completely levelled.

By opening up the Mission site there is certainly an added excitement as we can now imagine more clearly what this will look like when the main development begins.

Planning permission has been granted for 24 apartments on the site that ahs been cleared but it is not expected that construction will begin in the near future due to the downturn in the housing market and the difficulties in the banking sector.

[Photos were taken by Guy Poland of Guy Poland Photography, who is also a member of staff at EBM]

The morning began early with breakfast at EBM. Present were local politicians, councillors and MLAs, as well as board members from Skainos Ltd and EBM, to hear presentations from Glenn Jordan of Skainos and Bill Barnes from St Luke’s United Methodist Church in Orlando Florida.

Sammy Wilson, the DUP Minister at the Department of Environment was present, which was significant because today the Skainos Project was submitted for planning approval.

This is another major milestone for Skainos and one which many people, even some of those closest, had cause to doubt would ever come. But we’re here, and we understand from the planners that they will process the application within four months. Members of the Skainos Unit and the design team have been working flat out this week to ensure the papers were ready, and now all of them are looking forward to the weekend.

Around 30 members of the congregations of Sydenham and Ballybeen Methodist Churches came from breakfast at EBM last Saturday morning as part of Home Missions Weekend. Whilst here they had a tour of the Mission facility and then heard presentations on the Skainos Project and on volunteering.

Following the successful completion of the fundraising programme for the Skainos Project, the first full roundtable meeting of all the main funders took place yesterday. Present at the meeting were the Skainos Unit staff and representatives from the Department for Social Development, the International Fund for Ireland, and the largest funder in the package, the Special European Union Programmes Body (SEUPB) Peace III Programme.

The meeting concerned cash flows and budget lines and marks another key  milestone in the development of the project.

Skainos Unit staff are meeting all the main funders today to look at the detail of how the funding will flow, where it will be applied and what will be allowed or disallowed.

After many years of development, design and negotiation this is an extraordinary milestone on the way.

We are finally engaged in meetings that are about project delivery rather than project development.

Hazel Blears MP, Secretary of State for Communities & Local Government made a whistle stop tour of the Skainos Project on Thursday 09 October. Her interest was in the role of faith-based organisations in community regeneration and having had a walk round the work of EBM, including the Re:Store warehouse, she joined staff and officials in the Rutherford Room for a conversation on urban regeneration.

On 22 September the Skainos Unit were delighted to host a visit from the international support team of a faith-based community regeneration project called Mosaic21 in Zagreb, Croatia. The delegation was led by the scheme promotor and vision setter Mihal Kreko, a local Baptist pastor.

The Skainos team were intrigued to discover that  the experience of developing the Skainos Project over the last 9 years may have wider application than simply the Ballymacarrett area.

The Skainos blog has been off-line during the summer so our apologies for the lack of news and updates. That’s not to say though that the project has been inactive. Far from it in fact, and as of today the full funding package is in place, the Stage D design is virtually complete and a pre-planning consultation has been held with the Planning Office in advance of our full planning application later in October.

We’re back in harness now so expect news, storie sand updates on a regular basis.

One of the issues which has come to light in planning for the Skainos Project has been the existence of an old graveyard on the site, which was covered over some time in the 1950s we think.  In preparation for construction we are researching the graveyard, its location, the identity of those interred and what must be done if we uncover remains during construction.

What we have discovered about the cemetery to date indicates that there is considerable social history tied up into it which we hope to honour in the construction of Skainos, and about which we will blog in the coming weeks.

We have reconstructed some of the timeline thus far:

1826               Opening of the Methodist Church and graveyard
1891                Already the graveyard is in considerable state of disrepair, prompting letters to be written to                         editors
1918               Application to Belfast Corporation for the closure of the site
1941               Surrounding area, including Church and graveyard destroyed during the Belfast blitz
1950s?           Cemetery  covered, perhaps during the construction of the new Church building
2008              The existence of a cemetery comes to light again.