Improving Access for Everyone at The Clifton Centre
The newly rebranded and relaunched community venue the 'Clifton Centre' (formerly the Southwater Area Community Centre) in St Leonards on Sea needs your help to get a new lift. Up to 400 local people use the centre each week. However, part of the community doesn’t have access to the whole of our fabulous, much loved, beautiful re-branded building. If you’re a wheelchair user, have a mobility impairment, have a chronic illness resulting in limited energy, are pregnant or are a mum with a pram, the upstairs spaces are currently inaccessible.
Our Campaign
We are raising funds for our busy community centre to replace our out-of-date and out-of-order platform lift. The new modern platform lift will meet current safety regulations, with safer walls and a better door function that can be used more easily by people with mobility impairments. With our new 25-year lease, the lift is essential to our functionality now and in the future. We want our community centre to be known as a good quality venue, where everyone in our town is welcome.
Please donate if you can and help us ensure our space is fully inclusive and accessible to everyone. Any monies raised will be ring fenced and put towards a bigger funding bid that we are researching. This will be an application to Heritage Lottery Fund, Charitable foundation or a Landfill Operator .
Who we are
Our charity is the Southwater Area Community Centre (Charity Registration No: 1105027), and we have been serving local residents for 20 years. This year we signed a new 25-year lease, so we have relaunched and re-branded as The Clifton Centre, to reflect the building's previous history as a pub, The Clifton Tavern. We engaged local artists to produce new signage and a mural on the side of the building.
Our Location
We are located next to St Leonard's Warrior Square Station, with plenty of parking, lots of buses and metres away from the thriving town centre with independent shops and cafes nearby. Although St Leonards on Sea is ever more popular, the town still has areas of high deprivation (in the worse 1 per cent, according to national indices of deprivation 2019).
About the Clifton Centre
The centre includes three rooms to hire by the hour, from as little as £6 per hour, a cafe style sitting room, a small meeting room and a larger hall. We also have four offices rented to creative businesses, a therapist, a crafter and disability activist and a well-known writer / performer.
Who uses the Centre
As a charity, we are well connected to local service providers and projects and are regularly used as a venue to serve up to 400 local people each week from our diverse community. This includes small community groups, larger voluntary organisations, small businesses, the local Councils, and training providers. Examples of activities are: meetings for social services family mediation, support for insecurely housed women, refugee resettlement language learning, free holiday clubs for kids, and youth citizenship programmes to name but a few. Therapists deliver one-to-one sessions with music and art to neurodiverse people, people experiencing trauma or living with learning disabilities. We host social and outreach groups for people with hearing impairments, WEA and University of the Third Age activities as well as support groups for people recovering from drug and alcohol addictions. The centre is also busy with committee meetings, clubs, writing groups, rehearsals, and all sorts of leisure meetings.
The photographs below show some examples of activities which have taken place at The Clifton Centre:
Spring Into Summer
In April 2021, we received funding from the Hastings and St Leonards Foreshore Trust to run the Spring Into Summer project, providing a programme of exercise and craft activities to local people who had experienced isolation during the COVID pandemic. One of our downstairs rooms in the centre had become a creative hub for inclusive creative projects, so we engaged their organisation to run this programme on our behalf, as our unreliable 20-year-old lift meant that the upstairs hall was no longer accessible to people with mobility impairments. Activities were: Sound Out Your Stress (using music and meditation to relax and reduce stress, Letter It Loud (using old-fashioned lettering to make posters and banners), Make Do and Mend sewing classes, and general craft classes.
Spun Glass Theatre Baby & Toddler Groups
First and Second Workshops are weekly sessions for babies, toddlers and their parents / carers. Themed, creative workshops that inspire young families to have fun together and enjoy creative, artistic activities. Spun Glass Theatre are heavily funded by different arts programmes and are able to offer spaces for free to parents on Universal Credit, parents under 25 or single parents. They also offer travel bursaries to help parents travel to the centre.
“It’s creative, relaxing and full of good ideas to do at home. I honestly feel invigorated after the session and genuinely look forward to them each week.” Parent feedback.
Census 21 Heritage Project
A local group researching the history of their house using Census information and historical documents. In conjunction with Brighton University and Strike A Light Arts and Heritage.
Christmas Club
A free x4 day kids club, organised by Arts on Prescription. With a 'medieval monk' teaching children how to write using calligraphy.
Music Therapy with Yair Katz
Yair is a highly experienced music therapist and works for Eggtooth and Music Wellness, and also offers private sessions. He delivers music therapy on a weekly basis to people with a range of support needs, including neurodiverse people and those experiencing trauma.
French Cooking School
Earlier this year our upstairs hall was hired by a cooking instructor from the Sarah Lee Trust to run a two-session french cookery school, with part of the fees paid by students being donated to the Sarah Lee Trust. There are already plans to make cooking classes an ongoing activity at the centre, for example, making health snacks for children, and easy and nutricious cooking for people whose health conditions mean they have low energy.
Our 20th Anniversary
We celebrated our 20th anniversary on 20 May this year. As well as tenants and users of the centre, attendees at the gathering included MP Sally-Ann Hart, the High Sheriff of East Sussex, Jane King, the Deputy Lord Lieutenant of Sussex, Sarah Kowitz, and former MP Michael Foster, who officially opened the centre in 2002.
The guests were welcomed by Cllr Peter Pragnell, the chair of trustees, who recalled that the building started life as a pub, the Clifton Tavern, which closed in the 1990s - hence the new name.
In 2000 the building was acquired by the council for the Southwater Area renewal project using government regeneration funding. “A lot of work went into turning a derelict pub into a thriving community centre,” Cllr Pragnell said. “On 18 May 2002 MP Michael Foster officially opened the Southwater Area Community Centre.”
Ms Hart welcomed the community spirit at the heart of the centre’s achievements. “One of the things that is amazing about Hastings and St Leonards is the people in the community and their passion about where they live, and the success of a venture like this is because of the local people supporting it, the volunteers,” she said.
An art exhibition curated by Nick Hill, who recently stepped down as a trustee, and a display depicting the history of the Victorian building and centre were on view. Guests were treated to poetry readings by Francis Saunders and Penny Pepper, both tenants of the office space and users of the centre’s facilities, and musical entertainment from Yair Katz, who gives music therapy at the centre.
Moving Forward
We really are at the heart of the community, fulfilling our charity’s mandate ‘to support and provide opportunities to improve the lives of local residents’. WE want the centre to continue to be a good-quality, modern venue that reflects what our diverse community stands for; everyone is welcome, and their needs are respected and met.
Recently we have completed a range of repairs and refurbishments to ensure the centre continues to deliver for generations to come. We repaired the solar panels and fitted energy-saving lights to make us more sustainable, replaced flooring to improve hygiene and put up new signage. We've spruced up our furniture, given the walls a new lick of paint, and installed extra security features.
Accessibility
Our main focus has been on making the centre properly accessible to all. We have changed our threshold and removed a railing outside the building to ease access for wheelchair users and replaced our entry phones to make them more accessible to people with hearing and visual impairments. However, replacing our lift is out of our budget reach and that means the many people with mobility impairments or are unable to manage stairs who need to use our upstairs hall and meeting room are unable to.