Back to the future for Worth Park

Back to the future for Worth Park

Crawley Borough Council has been awarded a Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) grant to restore Worth Park.

The park, formerly known as Milton Mount Gardens, has received a first-round pass of £2,189,000, including £237,000 development funding to help return the area to former glories.

The development funding will be used to detail how Worth Park will be restored and used by more people. This will include detailed drawings of how the park should look in the future and will be finished by next summer.

A first-round pass means that the HLF believes the funding can deliver high quality benefits to park users. It’s an endorsement of outline proposals and having been awarded a first-round pass, the project now has two years to submit fully developed proposals to compete for almost £2 million.

The next stage for the council will be to develop the project into a bid to restore and improve the park. If we are successful we are likely to find out in December 2011. The three-year project would start soon afterwards.

The bid follows consultation with more than 200 park users over the past few years, which identified a great strength of feeling and affection for the park. Local people value the park as part of their heritage and are very proud of the history of the gardens. The majority of people listed restoration of the Clock Tower, gardens, camellia walk, fountain and lake as their top priorities.

Worth Park covers eight hectares and consists of formal gardens, recreational parkland and a lake area, which is a site of nature conservation interest. It was originally a medieval deer park and formed part of the Forest of Worth, which stretched from Slaugham in the south to Worth in the north. The park hides the remnants of a high status late Victorian pleasure garden and landscape, constructed by James Pulham and Son.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 29th, 2010 at 17:45 and is filed under News Bulletins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.