Merville House Restoration
In April 2000 Patricia Pepper, Jackie Thompson and Brian McNally began the restoration of Merville House when they met Belfast Regeneration Office officials, amongst others. The meeting with potential funders was initiated by local North Belfast MLA Fred Cobain after a chance meeting with MRA committee member Barbara McPhee. However, Stephen Hamilton, another Merville resident, joined the committee and formally set up Merville House Limited in February 2002 to help garner funding for the project. Other key players in the Merville House team included the late Jackie Thompson, and Carol and Colin Simms who assisted with grant applications. The scheme was ultimately funded by Ulster Garden Villages Limited, International Fund for Ireland, Newtownabbey Borough Council, Newtownabbey Local Strategy Partnership and Belfast Local Strategy Partnership and a private donor. The house was officially re-opened on 27 April 2006 by Baroness Blood, a well-known community activist in west Belfast. Today Merville House is utilised by the whole community.
Read more about this topic: Merville Garden Village
Famous quotes containing the words house and/or restoration:
“The night in prison was novel and interesting enough.... I found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I claim that in losing the spinning wheel we lost our left lung. We are, therefore, suffering from galloping consumption. The restoration of the wheel arrests the progress of the fell disease.”
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948)