£3.5 million Award for Cedars Development

The government has awarded Wells Cathedral School a total grant of £3,500,000 from its Standards and Diversity Targeted Capital Fund to enable the school to move forward with its construction projects – the new classrooms in the Laundry Gardens site, and Cedars Hall as part of the Cedars Development project.

The grant has been given following a recent application by the school to the government Fund, and awarded as a result of the school’s continued excellence in music, sustained academic success and commitment to ‘whole person education’.

Head, Elizabeth Cairncross said “We have received this money because we already have a reputation for sharing what we have, and for being a good model of the way a school community can be. This award comes with a huge responsibility – not only to use it well and carefully and wisely in the buildings we design and build, but to use those buildings in a way which justifies the grant that we have received for them, both in sharing them with the wider community and the wider world, and in making sure that when people learn in them they are learning and developing skills and talents which will enrich their lives, and the lives of others.”

Cedars Hall, the new music learning and performance facility will contain a technically-excellent recital hall and inter-connected flexible spaces for teaching, rehearsing, performing and recording for students and teachers. Sited in The Cedars estate, the Georgian heart of the school, Cedars Hall will lie on the historically significant axis with Wells Cathedral’s Chapter House, and both share the function of gathering spaces for the local and regional community.

Please contact Tony Bretherton, CEO, t.bretherton@wellscs.somerset.sch.uk for any further information about 'The Campaign for Wells' fundraising projects.

Architechts' impression of the new Cedars Hall