On Friday I was absolutely delighted to visit West Sussex Fire and Rescue Service’s brand-new Horsham fire station and training centre.
This new multi-million-pound site at Highwood, the product of substantial West Sussex County Council investment, provides a state-of-the-art training centre, the first of its kind for West Sussex, ensuring our firefighters (including retained teams) maintain their training and resilience.
The training centre includes different training environments; allowing firefighters to be immersed in real-life situations to which they may have to respond. This includes a live fire training facility, a cold smoke training tower and immersive incident command suite. Firefighters also attend a huge amount of road accidents and I was pleased to see a dedicated road traffic collision training area.
The new Horsham fire station marks an exciting time both for our local team and the wider service. The previous Horsham fire station was built on Hurst Road back in 1968. It is right that our local team and the rest of the County have facilities that are fit for the modern day and enable them the best environment to respond to and train for incidents.
Another highlight of the weekend was this year’s Children’s Parade! A huge amount of work had gone into the parade displays and costumes; with the theme of this year being classic stories. A whole range of loved children’s stories paraded through Horsham from the Chronicles of Narnia and the Jungle Book; through to Tintin and Gangster Granny. A huge well done to all the Horsham schools that took part.
The parade was greatly enjoyed and ended in Horsham Park where Horsham Rotary had laid on their Funday to celebrate their 100 years of service to our community.
Rotary club members can often be seen in the town holding collections or organising other fundraising events to raise money which goes to support both the local community and international causes.
The Funday was a great success with lots of stalls and activities for everyone to enjoy. Thank you to all the volunteers who made both the Children’s Parade and the Funday possible and congratulations to Horsham Rotary on such a milestone anniversary.