New venue and cafe at Wednesbury community centre in £20m levelling up plans
Plans to refurbish and extend a community centre as part of £20m ‘levelling up’ plans in Wednesbury have been revealed.
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The ageing Millennium Centre in Friar Park Road, Wednesbury, will be renovated alongside a new events space for 150 people under plans by Sandwell Council.
The community centre currently houses a nursery and children’s play area, dance studio, sports hall, and meeting spaces, but it would be extended to make space for new events for weddings and parties, DJ sets, and open mic nights.
A new café would also be built.
The application reads: “The proposed development of the Millennium Centre involves the reconfiguration of the existing floor plan and creating an extension to accommodate the space needed for the centre to offer diverse services for more people.
“The project also provides opportunity to create a better street presence and welcome to the building, enhancing the user experience, as well as adding an additional footprint for events and an additional kitchen to support a community café within the existing footprint.”
Wednesbury’s Millennium Centre was built in the 1970s and extended in 1999.
Sandwell Council was awarded more than £20m in government ‘levelling up’ money last year to make improvements to Wednesbury town centre and help build a new 600-home estate in Friar Park and improve the ageing Millennium Centre.
A further 105 homes are set to be built on playing fields behind the estate’s High Point Academy.
Most of the ‘levelling up’ work was expected to have been finished by March this year but now the majority of the projects have been pushed back months and even years.
At the end of last year, Sandwell Council said its “complex” projects would be pushed back after the government’s deadline.
The local authority said planned upgrades to Friar Park’s Millennium Centre would not be finished until November 2025, instead of June, and improvements to some of the town’s parks and green spaces would not be done until January 2026 rather than next summer.
While most of the green space improvements have been completed, centrepiece work to build a new pavilion at the Hydes Road playing fields has been pushed back by nine months.
Wednesbury was among 20 towns and cities across the country to be given a share of levelling up funding by the government, with the Black Country town singled-out for its poor qualifications, shorter life expectancy and lower average wages and productivity.
Friar Park was earmarked for funding as a third of residents in the ward have no qualifications, the highest rate in the borough.
When the funding was announced in September 2023, the ‘levelling up’ project in Wednesbury was described as “ambitious” with the government’s tight March 2025 deadline called a “significant risk” and the council was running the risk of losing some or all of the funding if not spent by March.
