There’s No Place Like Home – Maria’s “Ours” Story

If people ever tell me that they don’t have anywhere to go, I always tell them, ‘There’s the Greenhouse Centre.’ There’s nothing in the community like it.

My name is Maria. Both of my kids have grown up with the Greenhouse Centre community around them. My eldest, Luna, joined the Centre nine years ago when it first opened, with her younger brothers Luca and Luis following suit soon after.

The Greenhouse Centre is magical inside – a grand historic building. When you walk in, you feel it straight away, the light through the stained glass, the atmosphere, the sense that something special happens here. You know it’s a place for the community, so seeing it open again is really exciting.

Between me and the kids, there are loads of memories that I have in the Centre. One of them is definitely the Christmas parties.

They were a great thing for the whole community! We’d all come in our Christmas jumpers, share food, share stories, the parents could speak on the side while the children were playing… there was a sense of family in the building.

Us parents in the community really have been striving to stay together in the time the Centre has been being refurbished.

We do still get together here and there, we do our best to see each other, let the kids play with each other, the parents do our thing. But honestly? It hasn’t felt the same. There’s no place like home, you know? So we all can’t wait to be home again.