The Chair of the Buile Hill Mansion Association (BHMA), Mark Frith, is excited for the future of the Buile Hill mansion, despite failing attempts to turn it into a drama school.
With Covid still prominent, Frith said it came as ‘no surprise’ for the drama school proposal falling through, but is extremely positive about the future of the mansion as the BHMA continue talks with the council.
A vision document for the site will now be created and shown to the council, containing research conducted over the last 12 months with Buile Hill park users as well as responses to previous council questionnaires.
He said; “Myself and the BHMA are very excited about future discussions we’ve now got.
“We’ve been invited to six-monthly meetings to put our proposal forward, which is based on 12 months of community consultation work that we’ve been doing at the allotment sites in the park.
“We are very much on the ground listening to people and we want to feed that information back to the council in a constructive way where we can all have an open debate about it.”
The BHMA has found a landscape architect who holds one of the allotment plots on site and he has helped draft up some vision documents to propose to the council.
“Another contact we’ve had through a mutual allotment, his father is a builder and he’s happy to have a realistic look at the buildings and making them safe, his company has already looked at renovating park buildings and created new sustainable buildings.
“For us to have voluntary work from these professionals is fantastic.”
Frith also highlighted the impact of the recently installed allotment site and groups such as the Friends of Buile Hill Park, Growing Togetherness and the Salford croquet team working together in order to help plans for the mansion to come to fruition.
Recently, these groups have helped create a demonstration area, which includes a revamped allotment area. Also work has been done to convert the old bowling green pavilion into a community café containing accessible toilets, which has remained open throughout lockdown.
The location of the demonstration site and the mansion can be found in the interactive map below.
“We’ve all worked very hard to create a demonstration site really for what we can do at the mansion house” Frith said.
Frith says the allotments are a key sign to show the council of what can be achieved with the community coming together, with the success apparent as seen in the video below.
The mansion has a long history, dating back to 1825, and Frith wants this to continue as part of the plans being put together.
To help with this, the BHMA have teamed up with history website Eccles Old Road (ecclesoldroad.uk) which will provide detailed history of the park and mansion, which will be displayed in the cafe pavilion building.
He said: “The importance isn’t just bricks and mortar of the mansion house, it’s the bricks and mortar of peoples memories, capturing all of that and making for that it doesn’t get lost.”
A timeline of the history of the Buile Hill mansion can be found below.
Frith has also made an extended YouTube video about the history of the mansion as well as the mansion association which can be found here.
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