AN ARDROSSAN church that fell into disrepair is to be re-opened after it was bought by a charity.

The Scottish Centre for Personal Safety has purchased Barony St. John’s Church and Halls situated on Ardrossan’s seafront at the corner of Prince’s Street and Arran Place.

The church, which was previously owned by the Church of Scotland, had fallen into disrepair and become unsafe to use and was put on the market a few months ago before being bought by the Scottish charity.

The Scottish Centre for Personal Safety provides personal safety, conflict resolution and practical self defence training to businesses, schools, nurseries, groups and individuals throughout Scotland and up until this purchase have been a ‘cyber-centre’ basing themselves on the internet and travelling to wherever they were needed.

Executive Manager, Alan Bell, explained why the charity decided to purchase the church he said: “We felt that although it was extremely cost effective to not have a physical building as our base and save on the various overheads that incurs, many of the businesses and organisations we dealt with wanted to visit our ‘office’ and many of the funding streams which we tap into wanted to see an actual physical presence in Scotland – so we decided to purchase in the Central belt area.

"We needed somewhere which was big enough to offer classes and courses and big enough to accommodate our future plans.

"Barony St. John’s Church and Halls was a perfect fit for us.” Explaining the charity’s ‘future plans’ Alan added: “Phase One of our plan is to make the existing hall into a community centre offering not only our personal safety, self defence, first aid classes etc. but also offering fitness, exercise and dance classes for the community as well.

"We have developed an online survey at Survey Monkey which we hope readers will access and complete to tell us what they want to see the hall being used for.

"This way, we plan to have a truly ‘community-led Centre opened by next Summer.

“The hall building itself is in need of repair and renovation work and we are currently trying to source funding grants to help us achieve this.

"We are also looking for volunteers to help paint, decorate and clean the hall so if any readers are good at DIY, plumbing, joinery or just fancy helping out, please get in touch with us via our online survey at www.surveymonkey.com/s/F2HHMKD "We really hope the public get behind us with this project as the reception we have had so far from local organisations has been fantastic.

“Phase Two is the main church building and will hopefully include a public cafe area to allow people access to the original church alter and organ plus a separate training hall and dormitory for residential courses – however this is some way down the line as the cost of repairing and renovating the main church building could run into the millions.”