See below for the story behind  Dan's memorial garden which is located at Audley Football Club

 

 

 

The first of June 2019 marked the end of 3 years planning and construction when  ex Stoke City footballer Terry Conroy cut the orange ribbon and we were finally able to open Dan’s memorial garden at Audley Football Club.

                                 It was a bit daunting when we first saw the piece of land that the football club had given us, it was overgrown and being used as a bit of a dumping ground for rubbish and bricks etc. We

genuinely didn’t know where to start or how we were

going to fund turning it into a garden. As is the case with

a lot of things these days social media came to the rescue,

we put a request on Dan’s face book page for someone to

help us with a design and we were very fortunate that

Mat Hennessey,  one of Dan’s friends who has his own

landscape design company based in London, agreed to

help us. Having viewed the plot while he was in the area

visiting family Mat went away and produced a design for

us. So we had a design with a shopping list of materials,

now we needed some funding.                                                        

 The Building firm Jewson’s run an annual building

better communities programme whereby small

groups can apply to be considered to receive a

share of £250,000 worth of building materials for

small projects; Adam Clarke from the football 

club saw it on-line and sent us the entry form.

I submitted a presentation pack which got us

through the first selection phase, The garden was

up against approximately 50 other projects from around the country who were all looking for funding. Following an internet vote and judging panel verdict we were over the moon to be awarded £10,000! This was in the form of a trade account with the

Congleton branch.

 

So now we had a design and some funds – all we needed

was to get started. Again we turned to social media for help

and this is when we met Simon Turner, a self employed

landscape gardener from Miles Green. Simon agreed to

project manage the construction of the garden for us, His

knowledge, skills and attention to detail have been

fundamental in the creation of the garden and we can’t

thank him enough for his efforts..

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      Yes, that is George C Clark presenting us with

       the  award ! Sue was well Pleased.

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 It’s impossible to say how many hours have gone into

turning that piece of wasteland into the garden it is today,

A lot of people have given up their weekends and evenings to help out with it and without their help there is no way it would have been completed. We’ve made new friends because of the work on the garden and had support from places we never dreamt of, Who’d have thought we would have had a team of SKY TV engineers working on it for a day, but we did thanks to James Burke. Ibstock brick from Chesterton kindly donated the bricks for the wall thanks to Jacqueline Evans; again completely out of the blue! Craig Mason has built the wall in his spare time after work and at the weekends despite having work to do on his own house. Yes, there were days and evenings when it was cold and raining and I was there on my own but that’s because it’s for Dan and that was the motivation, to want to see it finished and make as a good a job of it as we possibly could. That said we have been humbled by the passion and willingness to help by people who have families of their own. The plants supplied by Andrew Dobson of Boulton’s nursery from Stone have brought it to life, thank you to everyone who has kindly sponsored some of these or provided others.                               

 

People have helped in many different ways but no matter what contribution you have made no matter how large or small we as a family are indebted to you all. Thank you to the following for your help...Apologies if I’ve missed anyone

 

Simon Turner (Project Manager); Andrew “Tracker” Johnson; James Burke and the Sky T.V. engineers; Brian Wilson;  David Malpas, Neil “Chooch” Martin; Fin Martin, Andy Laws, Adam Clarke, Brian Finney, James Royal, Danny Green, Jacqueline Evans and Ibstock Brick, Kev Jones, Craig “Dagger” Mason, Paul Mason, Dave Barlow, Dave “Coops” Cooper, Ben Cooper for creating the sculpture for the garden, Chris “owd” Hughes, Lesley “our wench” Palmer, Steve Palmer, Robert Edwards, Frankie & Millie Simcock, Sue Hughes, Kim Hughes. Eddy Middleton. Deane Jervis & Potteries Building Supplies, Andrew Dobson & Boultons nursery, David Knowles and the staff at Jewson’s Congleton.

 

The garden is there for everyone to use and enjoy, it’s our way of giving something back to the very special people of the local community who have supported us since we lost Dan. We hope people use it, enjoy it and respect it.

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 Below is a picture gallery of the construction of the Garden.

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