Case Study

Florence Park Community Centre: more than just a building

Florence Park Community Centre in South West Oxford is home to classes, live music, group meetings and much more, making it a beloved part of the surrounding community.

We first carried out an assessment on the centre in 2024, where our team recommended up to eight measures. Since then, and following match funding from our Green Fund, the team at the Community Centre have acted on nearly all of the suggestions, saving money on energy bills and futureproofing this important building.

The report

The centre itself is a single-floor brick construction consisting of an entrance, meeting space, toilets, main hall with bar and stage, kitchen, cellar and utility room. Everything the Community Association spends comes from room hire, grants and the bar, so keeping the running costs down has always mattered to the volunteers managing it.

After visiting, our assessors set out eight recommendations for cutting the Centre’s energy bills, starting with simple measures like insulating the pipework in the boiler room, and working up to more costly projects like solar panels and, eventually, a possible move away from heating with gas to an air source heat pump. The committee at the time did insulate the pipework at a low cost, but nobody had quite the capacity to take the rest further.

We spoke to Danny Chivers, treasurer and trustee at the Florence Park Community Association, about the work they’ve done over the past couple of years to make the building more efficient to run. Danny joined the team in late 2024, and found the report helpful when reviewing the Centre’s energy bills. He says that it gave him the clear basis he needed (and the confidence) to start gathering quotes.

“The report meant that as a new volunteer, I could pick it up and immediately start running with it.”

Danny Chivers, Treasurer

The action

Since then, most of what the report suggested has been actioned. There’s a new timer on the electric water heater in the toilets, the ceiling tiles in the main hall have been replaced with insulation pads above, there’s draught proofing on the doors, a couple of gaps in the wall have been replaced by extractor vents. The heating now has proper controls so it can be set to match when the building’s occupied, with remote controls. Alongside all that, roof-top solar panels and a battery were installed, which was the biggest single project (and the most visible).

Gathering the funds to pay for all these projects took a while to piece together. Danny hadn’t done much grant fundraising before, so he relied on a volunteer with more experience to help shape the applications, and the two of them found it worked well to apply for a few smaller grants first. That gave them secured financial support to point to when approaching bigger funders, including match funding through our Green Fund, which he says made a useful case to other grant-givers too, because some of the funding was already secured.

The building being council-owned added its own complications. Installing solar meant applying for a licence to alter, and working through questions about who would insure the panels and what would happen to them if the lease wasn’t renewed, which took some back and forth with the council to sort out properly. Timing was probably the bigger headache in practice. The panels could go in without disrupting anyone, but replacing the ceiling meant clearing the building entirely, since the old insulation above the tiles needed to come down when the hall was empty.

Finding a stretch of time that worked for both the centre’s booking calendar and the contractors took longer than expected, and once the work started, they inevitably found old wiring and odd bits of equipment tucked above the ceiling that needed sorting out before anything else could proceed.

Despite the slight delay, Danny and the people who are regularly using the building are delighted with the results so far.

“We’re already getting loads of positive feedback from the community, because people do really care about what’s happening with the climate and our impact on it, and people also really care about this space… That makes all of the work worth it.”

Danny Chivers, Treasurer

The impact

The solar and battery system has been running since mid-2026, and Danny estimates that since then, more than half the centre’s electricity has come from the panels rather than the grid. The building uses the most electricity when it is sunny and hot mainly due to refrigeration of cold drinks and beer, so its helpful that this is when the solar generation is highest.

Beyond the numbers, the work has given the Association another useful community conversation starter. They held a launch event with a local environmental group, LEAF, when the panels were switched on, and Danny hopes it’ll help other people locally think about doing something similar with their own homes.