Scarr Bandstand - Celebrating our Forest
A film produced by the Foresters Forest Landscape Partnership about the project to bring Scarr Bandstand in Sling back into use by the community.
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NewsTranscript
00:00 [MUSIC]
00:08 The Ska Bandstand has been
00:10 absolutely integral to the brass bands of the forest.
00:13 They've been playing on the site for well over 120 years.
00:18 [MUSIC]
00:24 I'm Alison Collison.
00:25 I'm the secretary of Friends of Ska Bandstand,
00:30 which is a charity that maintains and restores the Ska Bandstand,
00:36 which is a heritage site in the Forest of Diggie.
00:40 [MUSIC]
00:43 So 1913 was the first bandstand that was built using funds raised by local people.
00:48 Band concerts were immensely popular.
00:51 The most popular was the Hospital Sunday events,
00:55 where collections were taken for the local hospitals and good causes.
00:59 This is before the NHS, of course.
01:01 Apparently, three or 4,000 people would turn up and watch the bands play.
01:07 There were speeches, and then most importantly, money was collected.
01:12 Then in the 1970s,
01:14 the land by now was owned by the Forestry Commission.
01:17 With their permission, local people, yet again,
01:21 collected money and put up the current bandstand.
01:26 We've got the remains of that now.
01:28 It had a beautiful shell roof at the time,
01:33 and bands continued to play until the early 1980s,
01:37 when for various reasons,
01:38 the site became derelict.
01:39 [MUSIC]
01:43 The bandstand roof was vandalized and had to be taken down.
01:47 The walls became unsafe.
01:49 When I first saw the site,
01:51 the nettles and the brambles were way above my head,
01:54 and it was just being used as a walk-through for dog walkers.
01:58 [MUSIC]
02:00 By the 2010s, the site was really at its most depressing.
02:07 At this point, a group of local people led by Bill Gaylor,
02:12 who was a local resident and a parish councillor,
02:15 got together with the idea that this piece of iconic heritage,
02:20 both for the brass bands and for the whole forest,
02:23 shouldn't be allowed to just disintegrate,
02:25 but could be rescued.
02:28 Friends of Scar Bandstand was formed just as
02:32 a local voluntary group to
02:34 try and make this a useful site for the community once again.
02:39 [MUSIC]
02:47 By chance really, Forrester's Forest was setting up that very same year,
02:53 and Bill Gaylor applied and got some funding from Forrester's Forest,
03:00 which set us off on the path to success.
03:03 Once we had restored the site by putting a boar fence around it,
03:08 absolutely vital, and recreating the grassy arena that was here to start with,
03:15 we also reinstated the car parks,
03:18 top and bottom, and also the tracks,
03:20 so that again, it's a usable site.
03:22 [MUSIC]
03:25 I think the most wonderful experience I've had on
03:29 the Scar Bandstand site was our very first brass band concert.
03:35 Having worked so hard for about two years to get the site going,
03:40 and to book the bands,
03:43 and to hope that an audience came,
03:48 and to do all the preparation and everything,
03:51 and then to see people streaming in.
03:53 A lot of people, we had over 300 people for the first event during the whole afternoon.
04:00 Then the band struck up.
04:02 [MUSIC]
04:09 I was gone. I was a mess.
04:11 [MUSIC]
04:14 To hear local brass band music playing at
04:18 the Scar Bandstand for the first time in 35 years,
04:22 it sounded sensationally good.
04:25 It was just magic.
04:27 It's what the place was built for,
04:29 and there they were, and there were the local people enjoying it.
04:33 It was just stunning.
04:36 So there is an appetite for
04:40 an outdoor events arena for the arts in the forest.
04:46 Friends of Scar Bandstand is now a charity, which is brilliant,
04:49 but we're still entirely run by volunteers,
04:52 and we would very, very much like other local people to join us,
04:57 and take this project forward.
04:59 There's lots to do. It's great fun.
05:01 It would be brilliant, especially young people,
05:04 next generation, bring them forward to help us with this project.
05:09 [MUSIC]
05:13 [APPLAUSE]
05:28 [BLANK_AUDIO]