What an opportunity!
Green Hive and the Trustees of Seaman’s Victoria Hall have agreed to investigate the possibility of bringing the striking 150-year-old building on Nairn's Harbour Street back into active use for the town.
The idea is to transfer ownership of the building to Green Hive. There's loads to do before we can be sure Green Hive can take it on, but with the Hall trustees, we’re going to do our level best to make it all work. It all depends on getting the right financial support, and we won’t know whether we’ve got that until next summer.
From our initial discussions we’ve come up with lots of ideas for how the Hall might be used, but we’re not going to go ahead before we’ve got a better sense of
what local people would like to see happen. To this end, we’ve been granted £25,000 by Highland Council to enable us to hire an architect and development specialists to support us in sounding out individuals, clubs, other charities and public bodies (like social work and police) on what might work best. We’ll ask them to prepare a business plan and architect’s plans for repairing and upgrading the Hall. We hope to commission these specialists by the end of November with a view to deciding the next steps sometime early in the New Year.
All being well, a revitalised Seaman’s Victoria Hall – Green Hive’s “Net Zero Nairn” community hub – would transfer to Green Hive ownership in the summer or autumn next year and open around the end of the year.
If you’d like to learn more, you can download our outline plan and a likely
timetable for its completion with the link below.
