Flats for locals in Old Vicarage, St Ives in Cornwall

Plans to renovate the Old Vicarage Flats building in St Ives took a major step forward this week after St Ives Community Land Trust signed the Town Deal Funding Agreement for the capital works.

Awarded £750,000 from the Town Deal Fund, the Old Vicarage Flats project is the first community-led housing project for the town centre. It has now received its first payment of £464,381.

Gareth Jones, vice chair of the St Ives Town Deal Board, said: “We are delighted to see the Old Vicarage Flats project moving forward.

“As well as providing much needed and genuinely affordable permanent homes for local people in the town centre, this project will also preserve an important historic building which has been at the core of our community for almost 200 years.”

Known originally as the Parsonage and built in the late 1830s, the building was home to the vicars of St Ives until the early 1950s, when Canon Jenkin moved into a newly built vicarage off St Andrew’s Street.

The building was then taken over by St Ives Borough Council, which converted the upper stories into four flats while the ground floor was owned by Cornwall County Council and used by a number of local organisations, including a nursery, the local WI and camera club.

The Old Vicarage lay empty from 2016 until the local community, through the St Ives Community Land Trust, raised the funds to buy the property in 2019, with the aim of rescuing the historic building and converting it to provide much needed affordable homes for the local community.

A drawing of how the inside of one of the flats could look after the work (Image: Supplied)

Jill Block, project lead for St Ives Community Land Trust, said: “We are keen to start work on the renovation and upgrading of the property and welcome the award of the Town Deal Capital Funding. It is a really exciting time to see significant progress being made.

“The building is regarded with so much affection by many local residents, many of whom share their lifetime memories with us of occasions where it has been part of their lives in one way or another.”

Run and operated by the not-for-profit community land trust, the project will provide two one-bedroom and four two-bedroom flats for rent to local people.

The project has attracted widespread community support, successfully raising more than £240,000 through a community share issue in 2019 along with many individual donations.

The Trust is supported by the Architectural Heritage Fund, Homes England and charitable groups, and has also received donations from a number of local organisations such as the Rotary Club. It has also been given a £30,000 grant from the Government’s Community Led Housing Fund and support from Cornwall Community Land Trust.

As well as enabling the Trust to buy the building, the funding has enabled some preparatory works to be carried out in the building ahead of the start of the main project. These have included replacing the roof, repairing windows and removing asbestos along with some internal demolition work.

A total of nine projects in St Ives have been approved to share £19.9million from the Government’s Town Deal. These include plans to create a low carbon transport system, support local business and jobs, and develop new skills and supply chains, as well as provide new and transformed housing and community assets.

Of these, seven projects – St Ives Community Orchard and Nature Reserve, Leach Pottery, St Ives Guildhall renewal, Housing and Rugby Club relocation, St Ives Enterprise Grants scheme, St Ives Theatre refurbishment and the St Ives Community Land Trust Old Vicarage Flats renovation – have now received their first grant payments from the St Ives Town Deal Fund.