REJOICE, REJOICE!

Not Blue Suede Shoes

At St.Peter’s people regularly leave bags of jumble outside the church (or on the steps of the Office, which annoys our colleagues) because they know that we have market stalls to raise money for our social projects. Sometimes it just seems like bags of rubbish, but it is all kindly meant. Now, though, odd things have started to appear outside St.Mary Mags, and I’m quite sure that no-one expects us to sell them. There were two smashed-up motor scooters some time ago, but they disappeared as quietly as they came. Last week, though, there appeared a child’s scooter, abandoned outside the church porch; not a particularly nice one, mostly plastic, but in working order. Today, however, we have a pair of shoes, coral patent, wedge heels, quite glossy, placed beside each other on the pavement, some time around Usain Bolt’s 100m final. Curious.

A Question of Etiquette

What exactly is the correct form when a (clearly stolen) Boris bike is left on your property? This has now happened a couple of times this summer, parked up quite neatly on my forecourt, out of sight behind the fence. I confess that my policy has been simply to drag the things out into full public view, and to trust that they will either be re-used, or somehow be dealt with. The vans servicing the docking stations do not routinely come our way (because obviously there is no docking station on the Warwick Estate), so is there a number I can call?

Success at Last

At St.Mary Mags, we are rejoicing. We have succeeded in our bid for funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund. They will give us £3.6 million of a £7.3 million project, which is a brilliant result. We have also had tremendous support from Westminster City Council, who have been part of the process from the beginning, and so we are to receive a good chunk of what used to be called “Section 106” money, which is paid by developers to fund socially useful work in areas affected by their developments. From the start, officers from Westminster recognised that the project would deliver all sorts of desirable social outputs from their point of view, and made the project an integral part of their planning for the Estate, backing us when times were hard. Now that we have the recognition of Heritage Lottery funding it will be good to be able to repay their perseverance with us. Of course St Mary Magdalene’s PCC is not doing this alone; we have been in partnership with the Paddington Development Trust for about eleven years, and they will be the ones delivering the Project. For years we had meetings with representatives of the Council, the Diocese, the Primary School, and ourselves and PDT, inching the Project forward and keeping everyone on board. PDT carried out consultations, we had open days (one with a falconry display inside the church), we did market research. I think it’s seven years ago that we had the architectural competition to find designers for the new building, and the delay has made it clear that we picked winners, which is quite gratifying. Gradually the Project has got nearer and nearer to reality, but I’ve lived with it for so long that it’s hard to see it as totally real yet. Now the real work starts!