Glebe House gets £61k green boost

Glebe House gets £61k green boost

12 November 2025

ONE of Northern Ireland’s leading cross-community centres is being turned into a green community hub with the help of a £61,000 award from The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Glebe House in Kilclief, which is run by the Harmony Community Trust, was best known during The Troubles as a place to bring young people together. 

In the decades since the Good Friday Agreement, it has evolved to serve the wider community with a range of activities and classes including arts and crafts, local history, singing, health and wellbeing, as well as the ‘seedbed community garden’. 

The site at Glebe House  has several acres of ground that are not being actively used. This is an ecologically rich environment as well as a significant community resource.  

Thanks to the National Lottery Harmony Community Trust will have a detailed and agreed plan for future activities on the site by the end of 2026 as part of a welcoming and sustainable community hub. 

Trust chair Judith Thompson said: “This is a major piece of work which is volunteer-led but supported by professional and scientific expertise,” she said.

“We want our site to serve our local communities by providing outdoor resources with welcoming community access. This can help people to connect with nature and develop interests in sustainable growing and habitat management through positive, shared, cross-community activities,” she added.

The new initiative also involves researching and preserving the stories from Glebe’s House’s history – including from 1975 as a cross-community centre for children and young people – while ensuring that ecologically significant features of the site and its biodiversity are enhanced and protected. 

The work over the next 15 months will include documenting ecological features of the site and biodiversity monitoring, researching local histories and preserving memories, residents and group surveys and consultations – finding out how people would like to use the site, co-operating with local schools so that children can participate and developing volunteers’ skills for all future activities. 

Dr Paul Mullan, Northern Ireland Director at The National Lottery Heritage Fund, said he was “thrilled” to support Harmony Community Trust to develop plans for “a flourishing hub that will bring people together, growing and sharing skills and heritage”.

He added: “As one of the UK’s largest investors in natural heritage, we strongly believe that everyone benefits from access to landscapes rich in nature.”