Welcome to the The Mill, the new community hub for Cottingham and Middleton. The Mill Community Hub is a group of Trustees who have come together to ensure our local community has a sustainable and thriving community space.
If you’d like to be part of this fantastic team, we’d love to hear from you in whatever capacity you can offer. We’re looking for people who have great ideas for raising money, people who might have connections to some of the bigger funding sources and people who have specialist expertise in specific areas. If you think you can help and you’d like to get involved, please contact us to find out more.
From its location on the Mill Road side of the recreation field, The Mill will be whatever you want to make it and we believe it’ll be a fantastic facility for the whole community for generations to come.
We have seen a significant reduction in available funding pots to support the construction of new buildings. Typically, the small amount of funding that is available has tight “green” credentials within its criteria. This means that the current plans for the proposed new building would need significant tweaking and, potentially, re-submission for Planning Permission. We recognise that these factors will cause significant delays to the long-term objective of building a new structure. So the Board has been thinking hard about what would be the next best move for our community.
At this time we feel that prioritising the enhancement of the existing Villages’ facilities is the right approach. In line with our constitution, it has given us the opportunity to re-evaluate where this Board of Trustees can add value at this time to our community.
Our medium-term goal, therefore, is to support our friends on the Village Hall Management Committee (VHMC) to ensure we have a future-proof solution to the sustainability and profitability of our current community facility.
However, we are planning to build the car park element of the Mill project in the fairly near future. This will be in the field beyond the school towards Bringhurst. This will have multiple benefits such as providing parking at school drop-off and pick-up times, parking for events and meetings at the Village Hall Annex, and enabling greater use of the recreational field for sports.
For us to achieve any of our medium/long-term objectives we need to begin with some smaller initiatives.
Some of the latest initiatives being explored for the current Annex include;
- Transfer of the village acre and lease of the annex to the Mill Board
- New car parking facility
- Improve current Annex facilities e.g toilets, kitchen etc.
- Regular calendar of events
- Weekend Bar
- Grassroots Football
- Party bookings
- Online booking
- Fundraising team