About Pendennis COMMUNITY CENTRE
About Pendennis Community Centre
Pendennis Leisure was formed by residents of Falmouth, Penryn and surrounding villages to operate and enhance leisure services at Ships and Castles, Falmouth.
Pendennis Leisure was established to galvanise community support for and prepare for a community lead operation of Ships & Castles in the wake of the announcement that Cornwall Council intended to recommend closure of our leisure centre from end March 2022.
Unfortunately, despite strong campaigning from the community, Cornwall Council closed the leisure centre in April 2022 with a view to selling it for development.
However – the story didn’t end there. Falmouth Town Council successfully negotiated an option to take over the site under a Devolution Deal, protecting it from development and sale – and want the community to run it, which is where we come in.
OUR MISSION:
The Pendennis Leisure mission is to get a 6 lane 25m pool and a teaching pool (both accessible) at the heart of a functioning community activity centre open as soon as possible at the old Ships & Castles site. The journey to achieving that is long, and to succeed we will need significant public investment. While we work to secure that, we have reopened as Pendennis Community Centre.
Pendennis Community Centre (“The Centre”) is 100% volunteer-powered with a small café at its heart, and professional instructors brought into run fitness classes and training sessions for all ages and abilities. There are over 20 of those sessions every week with around 200 regular participants. The centre also welcomes diverse groups from across Falmouth for community meetings, choir practices, workshops and other events from gong baths to dog training.
We are extremely grateful for all the support we have received so far.
We are applying for some grants/pots of funding and we will do some internal fundraising also, to ensure that the Centre is both thriving and sustainable whilst we work towards our bigger aim.
The Site
The Centre, formerly know as “Ships and Castles Leisure Centre” sits on Pendennis Point, an iconic headland at the mouth of the River Fal and it’s historic harbour. The headland is steeped in history- including Henry VIII’s Pendennis Castle and scheduled monuments dating from the Civil war.
The centre was built in the 1990s and with it’s leisure pool, wave machine, river run and water slide it was a popular tourist attraction. However, for many years it was also the only public swimming facility available to the residents of Falmouth, Penryn and the surrounding area where hundreds of local people learnt to swim, enjoyed the physical and mental health benefits afforded to them from the centre.