Helping out Holme Farm
June 16th, 2022
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ShareJon at Brewers Woking was thrilled to be able to help the brand-new community hub initiative at Holme Farm.
Holme Farm is a registered charity, formed by a group of individuals with a passion for bringing their local community together while helping to improve mental and physical health and combat loneliness. Their ambition is to create a green space for the local community of Runnymede, Weybridge and Woking in North Surrey which offers a range of opportunities to improve physical and mental health.
Part of the ambition is to restore a barn to create a multi-purpose community space. To make this ambition a reality, specialist paints have been recommended and donated by Brewers Woking, with the help of The Little Greene Paint Company, to ensure the best finish for the project. 45L of Albany Masonry Paint, Rustoleum CombiColor, Hammerite Direct to Rust, Bradite One Can and Frog Tape have all been donated to bring the barns at the site back to life.
About Holme Farm:
The aim of Holme Farm is to improve social inclusion through the creation of a community hub, workshops, and gardens on unused farmland, with green & social prescribing, education, and conservation as our governing principles. Holme Farm will bring together residents from different backgrounds and ages to create an intergenerational, friendly and social environment to meet health and wellbeing needs, gaps in skills and build together a sustainable community resource for future generations.
‘We are very grateful for the generous donation of paint by Brewers to our community hub project. This is the first stage of renewing the buildings and the transformative effect has given both the site and the team of volunteers a real boost.’
Holme Farm is an eight-acre plot of land that has sat unused for decades and is planning to be brought back to life with the development of an outside space for a community allotment, sensory garden, apiary, biodiversity and wildlife projects (including a learning area) as well as the restoration of two buildings for carpentry, arts and crafts, a meeting room, café and welfare room. Holme Farm will be a safe welcoming facility for all the community where there will be a large range of activities such as gardening, nature conservation, exercise, wood working and sewing & craft working in order to create connections and relationships, whilst protecting and enhancing the environment. There will be the opportunity to gain skills, socialise and get involved with helping the community and environment. An overarching principle will be to source environmentally friendly materials and to initiate environmentally friendly practice (eg. recycle rainwater; generate solar electricity). The aim is to be carbon neutral for the whole site.
There will be a variety of opportunities based in different areas of the site:
• The Shed will be fully accessible with varying height benches for carpentry, metalwork, and mechanics skills.
• The Barn will provide a flexible set of interconnected rooms which will be available for multiple purposes. There will be 2 workshops for arts & crafts use, a community meeting room, and coffee shop.
• The Learning Centre will be dedicated to biodiversity and environmental studies, with live wildlife camera feeds from around the site. Plants and animals can be used to engage individuals with learning difficulties and disaffected young people, instilling a sense of responsibility, and providing routes into education and/or employment. It will be sited away from the main buildings in a quiet a safe space to enable the space to operate separately from the main hub.
• The Allotment will have fully accessible raised beds and pathways, and a 27m polytunnel to allow the growing of plants both earlier in the year and protect the plants and people from inclement weather.
We cannot wait to see Holme Farm evolve and see the results of all the Trustees’ and volunteers’ dedication and hard work pay off. To find out more about the project, please click here.
