Cemetery Road Baptist Church, Sheffield

Story By Mike Green, Volunteer Fundraiser at the church

AFTER raising £4,000 from its 180th Anniversary Appeal, Cemetery Road Baptist Church is praising God and thanking funding bodies for donations totalling £134,000 to re-cover its main roof, improve its insulation and install tucked-away solar panels to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Funding donations are from Veolia Environmental Trust, FCC Communities Foundation, Sheffield City Council’s Community Infrastructure Levy Fund, the Henry Bottom and Harry Bottom Trust, The Bernard Sunley Foundation and Allchurches Trust.

Work has started to replace the Grade II listed building’s porous concrete roof slates with natural slates, topping-up its roof insulation and installing photovoltaic solar panels on a part of the roof that cannot be seen from street-level. The church’s carbon dioxide emissions are expected to fall by over 80 tonnes over the next 25 years.

The work is part of an ambitious masterplan to return the building to the heart of the community. The church’s next fundraising challenge is to replace the building’s inefficient gas heating boilers, to install double glazing and repair its hall windows, and to refurbish its Napier Street entrance and welcome areas.

Councillor Jim Steinke, member for Nether Edge and Sharrow Ward, Sheffield City Council, said: “CRB Church have consistently demonstrated a community spirit, which is exemplary in our view. A significant number of activities have originated from their passion to engage with the different communities that make up Sharrow and surrounding areas, which have vastly enriched those communities. The need to provide these from a building with better infrastructure is clear and they have demonstrated commitment to trying to raise funding from a wide variety of sources, including the Council’s Community Infrastructure Levy Fund”.

Lizzie Cooke, Head of Grants at The Veolia Environmental Trust, which awarded £75,000 through the Landfill Communities Fund added: “It’s wonderful these improvements have been able to start. The new roof will sustain not only the church building, but all the valuable community activities which take place within it, the benefits of which will undoubtedly be felt for generations to come. We’re glad to have been able to support this project”.

Peter Kennett, Fabric Officer, CRB Church said: “For 20 years our architects have been stressing the need to replace the failing 1960s concrete tiles with slate, as originally used in 1859, but we could not raise sufficient funds to do so. Thanks to the generosity of various trusts, we can now carry out the work, and an unforeseen benefit of the delay means that solar panels, which were only in their infancy 20 years ago, can now be installed, to make our church’s contribution to helping to save this world’s resources”.