Friday 5 December 2014

Heritage Lottery Fund gives Green Light for Cambo Stables Project.


After three years of planning, Cambo Heritage Trust (formerly Cambo Institute) in Fife has been given the go-ahead by Heritage Lottery Fund to commence work on the replacement of the Victorian range of glasshouses in the Walled Garden and also to take the Cambo Stables Project to tender.

Work to dismantle the glasshouses will commence in February 2015 and a series of activities/workshops is being planned around this.  Work will then begin on their replacement and it is anticipated that the new glasshouses will be in place and ready to use by August 2015.

Architects Page/Park have now been commissioned to further develop the plans for an education and training centre based in the historic stables buildings on Cambo to create a visitor hub providing improved facilities for the growing number of school and community activities, student gardeners, volunteers and visitors benefiting from and enjoying the Estate and its historic landscape. Established in 1998, the charity now provides a host of learning and volunteering opportunities in heritage, the environment, arts, culture and horticulture.

Currently, the Trust provides work experience and training for garden students, holds weekly sessions in Green Gym, Forest Education and regular art and environmental workshops for local schools throughout the year.   The Victorian gardens, and breathtaking snowdrop woods, now have a worldwide reputation and the demand for horticulture placements and volunteering has outgrown the existing facilities. 

The beautiful buildings, dating from 1765 and unused since before the Second World War, will be given a new lease of life to provide a hub for Cambo Heritage Trust and its ever increasing training and educational activities.   

Fundraising is now in full swing to raise the remaining shortfall required to begin work on the restoration of the stables buildings in the autumn of 2015. 

Sir Peter Erskine, Chairman of Cambo Heritage Trust, was delighted to hear the good news saying,

 “It is so exciting, after many months of hard work overcoming all the obstacles, to have final permission to start the rebuilding of the glasshouses and to commission the architects to take forward the drawings for the reincarnation of the stables to the next stage - going out to tender. The family are delighted with this huge step which will see the estate becoming once more a social, economic, artistic and training hub in a 21st century reflection of the functions of estates such as Cambo in earlier centuries.”

Find out more about Cambo Heritage Trust