SALFORD Y.C.W.

GET A NEW HQ
From Peter Men MANCHESTER, Wednesday A N old Manchester school where children once went bare' foot on stone floors and paid twopence a week for their schooling is to be turned into a completely up-to-date youth. centre. It will also be the new headquarters for Salford's Young Christian Workers, it was announced this week.
It is St. Augustine's Junior School, in the All Saints district of Manchester, which is nearly 100 years old. It is expected that the building will reopen as a centre for youth work some time next month, although it will be several more months before structural alterations are completed.
The downstairs part of the building will be used as a youth centre, whose spiritual director will be Fr. Vincent Whelan, and it will be open on five or six nights every week. Upstairs the Y.C.W. will have their headquarters, which will be used for meetings and study weekends.
The new centre will fill a longfelt need in Manchester, where rapidly increasing membership in the city's only Catholic club for young people, the LINK society. has pointed up the lack of fullscale facilities. Miss Joan Meredith, the Y.C.W. youth worker in the Salford diocese, will be in charge of the new centre.
At present the Y.C.W., which has 23 sections for boys and 13 for girls in the Salford diocese, have to hire a small room from the LINK society as a headquarters. Eventually it is hoped to make the new centre residential. but until then Days of Recollection and study weekends will continue to be held at various centres in the diocese.
I understand that the Y.C.W. has offered the Salford diocesan branch of the Young Christian Students, who have also been looking for headquarters in the Manchester area, the use of their premises.