Kingsbridge Centre Getting Ready for Christmas
By Bob Montgomery
The Program Manager at the Kingsbridge Centre north of Goderich says they're gearing up for the Christmas season.
Marian Hogan says the Lucknow and District Community Carolfest will be performing at the Kingsbridge Centre on December 6th and that involves five choirs from the Lucknow area, the Lucknow Classics Band and a ukulele group. And Hogan says rehearsals started this week for their Christmas Eve Celebration and that includes a reenactment of the Nativity Scene by young people while the Kingsbridge Community Choir sings. Hogan says they former church is decorated with live Christmas trees and given the history of the building, it's a very moving event.
And the history of the building after it ceased to be a church is an amazing story. Hogan says the church was closed in 2015 and offered to the community of Kingsbridge for one dollar. Hogan says they had to give it some serious thought but in the end decided to buy it. She says they met with all of the members of the community and said they would need pledges of 150-thousand dollars. They got that, and more, and became a registered charity.
Hogan says the motivation for buying the church was that given their location in Kingsbridge there was no place other than the church, for community gatherings, no place where people in the area could get together and they really wanted to still have that in their lives. So they worked very hard to keep that. Hogan says the whole building has been renovated, they now have an accessible lift as well as a number of other renovations.
The result is they now have the community centre they had hoped to have. They stage a major musical in June that involves 200 people from the community, including volunteers and a cast of forty to fifty people and that's directed by Warren Robinson, with music written by his wife Eleanor Robinson of Celtic Festival fame. They also host concerts in the hall, they have guest speakers, members from the community can rent the hall for things like Christmas reunions or high school reunions. Hogan says they've worked very hard so that everyone in the community, the county and beyond can enjoy it and she says the hard work has definitely paid off.
