£1m church revamp renews historic links with community

Broughton St Mary's Church in Bellevue Crescent was one of Edinburgh's last "burgh churches" – built and paid for by the city when the New Town was created.

Now it has just completed a year-long project to upgrade its accommodation and is to renew the old partnership between church and the local authority by housing a council service for people with learning disabilities.

Lord Provost George Grubb is due to cut the ribbon at a special opening ceremony after the morning service on 17 January.

Broughton St Mary's minister the Rev Joanne Hood said: "When the New Town was being developed the city built a church for every so many residents. Bellevue Crescent did not have a church in the design, but it reached the point where they needed another church, so they put it in the centre of the crescent.

"We are re-establishing a connection with the city that created the building in the first place." She said the church had wanted to upgrade the building to make it a better resource for the whole community: "There is not an obvious community centre in this area. A lot of groups use our building during the week, but the rooms were not in great condition."

The project concentrated on the lower ground floor, underneath the church sanctuary.

"There have always been rooms there, but we have excavated 350 tonnes of sand and rock to create more space," said Ms Hood.

"We now have a staircase from the front of the building down to that level and a wheelchair lift to get people between floors.

"We had a garden out the back, but we never got much use out of it, given the Scottish weather, so we have built a garden room on the back of the church. I've already got a wedding booked there for next year and we may work towards having a cafe there."

Among the first to use the new premises will be a group of adults with learning disabilities.

Ms Hood said: "I was approached by a social worker from the Bonnington resource centre who said that rather than service users travelling to the centre, they wanted them to start meeting in their communities – and there are 11 or 12 service-users in the Broughton and Bellevue area.

"This was the very thing we wanted – we wanted people in the community to use the building as a resource. So now the health and social care department will be running their Bellevue programme from one of our new rooms."

The Rev George Whyte, clerk to the Church of Scotland's Edinburgh presbytery, said burgh churches had originally been built as centres for the community. He said: "It's interesting that here we are reinvesting in one of the buildings they built to meet a different kind of need."