Our Church Hall

History

The Church Hall was originally constructed as a Mass centre whilst the the Church and Presbytery were being built. This was the solution arrived at by Fr. McGowan, the first Parish Priest, to enable Mass to be celebrated on the newly purchased plot of land on Finney Lane whilst the Church was being constructed and to remove the necessity for Sunday Mass to continue to be celebrated in the Heald Green Hotel.

The 'Stockport Advertiser' of the 18th January 1962 , reported, "The church presented Mr. and Mrs. Townsend with a SilverThe newly refurbished Church Hall Salver and a Papal Blessing in recognition of their help by providing accommodation every Sunday in 'The Upper Room' of the Heald Green Hotel for so many years for the celebration of Mass"

The cost of constructing the hall was £6,001.15s.4d in 1960. The first Mass was celebrated on Easter Sunday 1960. 

Once the hall came into regular use there were two Masses on a Sunday morning, one at 8.15am and the second at 10.45am, these times being determined by the scheduled times of arrival of bus service No 29 at the stop near to the Griffin Hotel. This was an hourly service.

Over the ensuing years the hall has been in constant use both for church services, social events and latterly is used regularly on a Sunday morning during the 11.00am Mass as a location for the Children's Liturgy. The hall is also used on a regular basis by the Guides and Rainbows as their regular meeting place. The hall is also available for private hire for functions.

In 2009 the hall however was in need of refurbishment and decoration in order to meet the demands of its increasing usage. This refurbishment was masterminded by Father Paul with the invaluable help of Mr. Bernard McCandry and a team of volunteer helpers. See report below....

Refurbishment of the Church Hall

Over the past few years there had been an undercurrent of desire within the Parish to refurbish the Church Hall. 

2009 has been the year to see that desire change into reality.

After much negotiation, January saw the installation of new PVC double glazed windows to replace the existing, but deteriorating, wooden single glazed units.

The next project involved three areas of activity, all running in a parallel time frame.

This covered the extension of the kitchen area and its total refitting, an extensive electrical renewal and a new replacement gas heating system. All of this work, along with the removal of the stage and the redesign of the stage area was completed in May.

Once this professionally undertaken work was completed, consideration was given to the whole internal and external redecoration of the building. It was known that a window of opportunity would occur during the month of August when the various groups regularly using the hall would stop for their summer break. Ignoring each weekend in August, this window was reduced to 21 working days in which to  complete the interior work!  In order to achieve this, the latter half of July saw the early stages of preparing certain parts of the hall in anticipation of the main event.

Having already made approaches to obtain volunteers to undertake the decorating work, we ended up with 16 people willing to offer their available free time and experience.

The Decorating Team 

Bernard McAndry, Mike Dell, Peter Lucas, John Mcough, Martin Bergin, Julian Cearns, Denis Cosgrove, Frank Doyle, Vin Jepson, Mike Nicholson, Garry Nother, John Redshaw, Tony Royle, Jim Taggart, Andy Turner and George Webster 

The maximum time available to them was 5 days per week from 9am until 4pm . They worked in various individual daily shift patterns, depending on their personal availability. This varied availability of labour was closely monitored so as to maintain continuity within the project and have sufficient labour on site at any one time.

Consequently the work started on Monday the 3rd August and was completed by Friday the 28th August, with the final stage being the fitting of the new curtains.

External work included within the refurbishment, was the professional replacement of the existing gutters with a continuous run of aluminium guttering.

Finally, early September saw the painting of the external wood cladding completed.

Kindly provided by Bernard McAndry