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← The Sand House Charity

2025-03-31-accounts

Trustees' Annual Report for the period

Period start date Period start date Period start date Period end date
From 01 April 2024 To 31
March		 2025

Section A Reference and administration details

Charity name

The Sand House Charity

Other names charity is known by

Registered charity number (if any) 1171875 Charity's principal address 7 Ayots Green Dunscroft Doncaster Postcode DN7 4HG

Names of the charity trustees who manage the charity
Trustee name
Office (if any)
Dates acted if not for whole
year		 Name of person (or body) entitled
to appoint trustee(if any)
1 Richard Bell
Chair
2 Mick Jenkinson
3 Andrew Isaacs
4 Mark Waterhouse
5 Heather Charlton
6 Amanda Pratt
Appointed 09.10.2024
7
8
Names of other trustees for the charity, if any, (for example, any custodian trustees)
Name
Dates acted if not for whole year
Names and addresses of advisers (Optional information)
~~—~~
Type of adviser
Name
Address
Name of chief executive or names of senior staff members (Optional information)
Not applicable
~~===—~~
TSHC Trustees Annual Report 2024-25 incl Appendix_Approved.doc 1

Section B Structure, governance and management

Description of the charity’s trusts

Type of governing document

Constitution dated 02 March 2017

Charitable Incorporated Organisation – Foundation Model How the charity is constituted

Trustee selection methods

Apart from the initial charity trustees, every trustee must be appointed for a term of three years by a resolution passed at a properly convened meeting of the charity trustees.

Additional governance issues (Optional information)

You may choose to include additional information, where relevant, about:

A Financial Policy and Procedures document was formally approved at a meeting of trustees held on 15 June 2017. Version 2.0 was agreed on 13 October 2021 and remained current throughout 2024/25.

A Health and Safety Policy document was issued on 7 November 2017. Version 2.0 was agreed on 13 October 2021 and remained current throughout 2024/25.

An Expenses Policy was issued on 8 April 2020. Version 1.1 was issued on 7 June 2020 and remained current throughout 2024/25.

The above policies are reviewed each year.

The five Trustees who were serving at the end of 2023/24 continued to serve throughout 2024/25. In addition, Amanda Pratt joined the Board of Trustees on 09 Oct 2024. Amanda was inducted into the organisation through meetings and discussions with Richard Bell, although her longstanding role as volunteer had already provided her with a good understanding of the charity’s activities.

Each Trustee serves for a maximum term of 3 years, after which they may seek reappointment.

New trustees who are not already known to the existing Board are interviewed by at least two existing trustees. The interview results are considered by a meeting of the existing trustees, and a decision made as to whether to appoint.

Richard Bell and Mark Waterhouse represent the charity at meetings of the Doncaster and District Heritage Association.

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Section C Objectives and activities

Summary of the objects of the charity set out in its governing document

To advance the education of the public in history, art, sculpture and other related subjects having a link to the former Victorian Sand House of Doncaster.

In planning and undertaking our activities during this period the trustees had due regard to the guidance issued by the Charity Commission on public benefit.

In summary, the following activities took place for the public benefit.

Summary of the main activities undertaken for the public benefit in relation to these objects (include within this section the statutory declaration that trustees have had regard to the guidance issued by the Charity Commission on public benefit)

Additional details of objectives and activities (Optional information)

You may choose to include further statements, where relevant, about:

Our charity is run entirely by volunteers and we are immensely grateful to them for enabling the charity to deliver the activities and projects that further its aims. Most of the activities that are summarised above required two or more volunteers, with the sand art sessions being particularly dependent on them. Our thanks go out to everyone who helped us to achieve our objectives in 2024/25.

Despite being located 200 miles away from the charity’s base, our Patron, Matthew Schellhorn, continued to show staunch support. That included a visit to Doncaster, in May 2024, during which Richard Bell, Chair of Trustees, provided him with a face-to-face update on the charity’s activities. His commitment towards helping us achieve our aims is greatly appreciated.

Section D Achievements and performance

Summary of the main achievements of the charity during the year

We began the year with 4 days of our pop-up sand art sessions during the Easter school holidays. These took place at The Point, the home of darts (Doncaster Community Arts). The Point had been the venue for our major sand sculpture exhibition in 2012 (before our charity was formed) and we were delighted to resume our relationship with the team there. 116 people attended over the four days, comprising mainly parents with children. From 18 feedback forms that we gathered during the event, the average rating awarded by parents was 9.3/10.

The five illustrated talks that we delivered in the year attracted an aggregate audience of 170 people. They included a first-time visit to

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Section D Achievements and erformance p

address a group of senior citizens at a residential care home. The talks were the 75[th] to the 79[th] since our charity was formed. In August 2024 we led another of our popular guided walks in the locality of the former Sand House. Once again, it elicited excellent feedback. On this occasion, we treated the walk as a fundraising event, achieving a good level of ticket income supplemented by merchandise sales to raise vital funds. The walk attracted 22 people. Attendance is capped for reasons of safety and to ensure that everyone can hear the commentary. For the sixth year in succession, we participated in the annual, Englandwide Heritage Open Days festival. As the Sand House is no longer physically extant, we look for innovative ways to celebrate its story, while meeting our educational objective. On this occasion, we ran a poetry/creative writing workshop. Eight people attended, with two out of 10 who had booked failing to turn up. Once again, excellent written feedback was obtained, and an average rating of 9.8/10 awarded. Both the Doncaster & District Family History Fair and the Doncaster Local History Fair returned in 2024, and The Sand House Charity exhibited at both. The former took place in October. The latter was held in November, at the Danum Gallery, Library & Museum, allowing us to place our stand alongside the permanent Sand House display in Doncaster Museum. We invited visitors to experience virtual reality, in connection with the VR project that we continue to develop (see below). History Fairs are always excellent opportunities to connect with people who are well-disposed towards history in general, but who may not have been aware previously of the Sand House. Of the project activities that we undertook in 2024/25, the most significant and the most time-consuming was to record and release an audio drama version of the Sand House stage play. It accounted for 46% of hours spent on projects and 24% of the total volunteer hours in the year. As a result of the major challenges of obtaining sufficient funding to remount Peter Spafford’s stage play, it had been decided during 2022/23 to produce a podcast version instead. Most of the funders who had donated to the proposed stage play remount had agreed that their funding could be spent on the audio version, enabling recording to go ahead in lateAugust 2024. Following several weeks of editing, most of the individuals who had been directly involved in producing the audio drama gathered together for a ‘listening party’ on 3[rd] November. The play then received its broadcast premiere on 1[st] December. Subsequently, the drama was uploaded to many of the major podcast hosting platforms. By 31[st] March 2025, analytics indicated that it had been heard from start to finish by over 650 people, in addition to those who heard it broadcast on Doncaster’s community radio, Sine FM (twice) and on East Leeds Chapel FM (where Peter Spafford is a presenter). In this year, the creation of a virtual reality experience focussed on the Sand House continued to be a key ambition. In order to gauge the level of support from the public for such a project, it was decided that we would purchase a Meta Quest Pro VR headset, taking advantage of a very favourable discount offered to charities by Charity Digital. Using this headset, one of our Trustees, Mark Waterhouse, developed a 3D virtual art gallery of Sand House images and videos, using an off-the-shelf, 3D environment. We then offered visitors to the Local History Fair the opportunity to try out the experience and provide us with feedback. In practice, the VR headset experience proved very popular, and was in use throughout the day. Feedback from users, all but one of whom had never

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Section D Achievements and erformance p used a headset before, was overwhelmingly positive. The day’s results were such that we were very encouraged to continue working towards our goal of a professionally-produced VR experience with education at its heart. As reported last year, we made a successful grant application to Doncaster’s Social Isolation Alliance in late-2023/24. The purpose was to add a projector to the Sand House display in Doncaster Museum. We progressed with the purchase and installation of the projector in June 2024. As soon as it was in working order, we began showing short Sand House videos on a loop. These enhance the museum display significantly and convey information that static displays alone are unable to do. We thank the Heritage Doncaster team for their help and cooperation on this project.

When presenting illustrated talks, and also when designing displays for history fairs, one of the challenges is how to explain, pictorially, the evolution of the Sand House site. During this year, we identified an architect and illustrator who was very well suited to updating our existing evolution sketches. During August and September a new series of sketches was produced, which we now use when we are confined to using static images. Facebook continued to be one of our main ways of routinely sharing educational information about the Sand House. Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) continued to be used, too. Our Facebook page Follows stood at 3,446 by the end of the year. Five newsletters were sent out to subscribers via Mailchimp during the year. The charity’s website was maintained throughout the year. Through the year we have continued to record all the hours expended by our volunteers, along with details of the activities undertaken. A total of 1084 hours were expended. This was up from 660 in 2023/24 and is the largest annual total since we began recording such information, in 2019/20. 46% of all the hours were expended on the audio drama and developing the VR project, reflecting their significance for our charity. APPENDIX A provides a detailed breakdown of the 2024/25 hours and activities.

Section E Financial review

The Sand House Charity aims to hold the equivalent of at least three Brief statement of the months’ running costs in reserve at all times. In practice, the charity has charity’s policy on reserves very few unavoidable costs, with insurance and web hosting being the only significant ones. Details of any funds materially Not applicable. in deficit

Further financial review details (Optional information)

TSHC Trustees Annual Report 2024-25 incl Appendix_Approved.doc

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You may choose to include additional information, where relevant about:

The charity’s usual principal sources of Unrestricted funds are donations by:

One Easyfundraising disbursement raised £37 in the year.

One grant was received, that being the one from the Social Isolation Alliance, which had been pledged late in 2023/24. The sum was £1,282, and it was to pay for the projector at the museum display.

Project-specific donations (i.e. not grants) into Restricted funds totalled £2,212. Of this, £500 came from the Doncaster & District Heritage Association, for the audio play. The remaining £1,712 project donations came from Richard Bell to cover one-off, significant spends.

Section F Other optional information

The charity can continue its routine educational work of providing illustrated talks, guided walks, online information via social media and attendance at history fairs while incurring very little cost. It is envisaged that larger, project-type work will continue to be funded by grants and our own fundraising activities. In simple terms, beyond the routine work, our activities will be determined by the level of funding that we can secure. Section G Declaration ~~_~~ The trustees declare that they have approved the trustees’ report above. Signed on behalf of the charity’s trustees Signature(s) Full name(s) Richard Nigel Bell Position (eg Secretary, Chair, Chair of Trustees etc) ~~SS~~ Date

22 October 2025

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APPENDIX A

The Sand House Charity: Details of volunteer hours and activities during 2024/25

Background

The numbers of hours expended by volunteers on behalf of The Sand House Charity have been recorded. This has been done to:

The following sections provide an analysis of the recorded hours and activities.

Hours expended per month

The peaks of activity are, in general, due to the following:

Hours per Activity Type

All volunteer hours are recorded against a standard menu of Activity Types. They are defined as follows:

Administration: Routine, office-based tasks not linked directly to a project or event. Examples include typing up meeting minutes, general correspondence, collating documents for accountant, preparing annual reports, etc.. Work recorded as Administration doesn't contribute directly to the charitable aims of the Charity, but is work that has to be done for the smooth running of the organisation or, perhaps, is a legal obligation.

Events excl. talks: This includes all events that are neither talks nor part of a specific project. Examples include attending history fairs and community gatherings, running pop-up sand art sessions, but also includes any preparation and follow up specifically relating to the event.

Meetings (not linked to specific projects): Trustees' meetings and meetings linked to the general running of the charity. They exclude any meetings that form part of a

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project, whether funded or not.

Projects: All time spent working on specific, time-limited activities with a particular output at the end, whether or not they have been funded specifically, from grants and other external sources. Examples include the Sand House play, the schools literacy project (Exploring Culture), and 3D digital modelling/VR work.

Research: This will usually be research into the history of the Sand House, possiibly but not necessarily at various libraries and archives i.e. it could be online, or reviewing previously acquired research material.

Social media: Posts and comments aimed at educating the public, including promoting events. (Technical updates and general, non-educational or non-event-related posts are classified as Administration).

Talks: These will usually be illustrated talks to either specific groups or the general public. Include preparation and any follow up specifically relating to the talk.

Training: Attending a training course or workshop or delivering training to others working for The Sand House Charity.

Other: Any activity not specifically included within the other Activity Types. Should a new Activity Type be identified it may be added to the drop-down list.

Using the above definitions, the volunteer hours per Activity Type across the whole of 2024/25 are as shown in the pie chart below.

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Breakdown of ‘Projects’ Activity Type

The hours expended on the largest Activity Type have been analysed in detail and broken down into the following specific activities.

END

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9

cuariycommission 1171875
The Sand House Charity
No (if any)
Charity Name
~~fo~~		 1171875
The Sand House Charity
No (if any)
Charity Name
~~fo~~		 1171875
The Sand House Charity
No (if any)
Charity Name
~~fo~~		 1171875
The Sand House Charity
No (if any)
Charity Name
~~fo~~		 1171875
The Sand House Charity
No (if any)
Charity Name
~~fo~~		 1171875
The Sand House Charity
No (if any)
Charity Name
~~fo~~		 1171875
The Sand House Charity
No (if any)
Charity Name
~~fo~~		 1171875
The Sand House Charity
No (if any)
Charity Name
~~fo~~		 1171875
The Sand House Charity
No (if any)
Charity Name
~~fo~~
01/04/2024
31/03/2025
Receipts andpayments accounts
Period start date
Period end date
To
For the period
from
~~es~~		 CC16a
Section A Receipts and payments
Unrestricted
funds		 Restricted
funds		 Endowment
funds		 Total funds Last year
to the nearest £ to the nearest £ to the nearest £ to the nearest £ to the nearest £ to the nearest £
A1 Receipts
Grants 1,282 - 1,282 -
Donations held in NatWest account 451 451 2,212 - 2,663 698
Other - - - - - -
Fundraisingactivities 110 110 - - 110 99
Disbursements(easyfundraising) - - - - - 71
Gift Aid from HMRC 47 47 - - 47 320
- - - - - -
- - - - - -
Sub total(Gross income for AR) (Gross income for AR)
608		 608 3,494 - 4,102 1,188
A2 Asset and investment sales, (see
table).
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Sub total -
-
-
-
-
Total receipts
608
3,494
-
4,102
1,188
~~——————~~
A3 Payments
Repayunusedgrant - - - - - 3,000
Postage 8 8 - - 8 16
Equipment, materials & costumes 240 240 1,271 - 1,511 20
Insurance 170 170 - - 170 503
Professional fees - - 9,562 - 9,562 -
Room hire 44 44 150 - 194 -
Subscriptions 14 14 85 - 99 10
Training - - - - - 95
Website 88 88 - - 88 19
Refreshments - - - - - -
Advertising 37 37 - - 37 -
Subsistence - - 487 - 487 -
Accommodation - - 105 - 105 -
Travel expenses - - 342 - 342 -
Volunteer expenses 88 88 200 - 288 -
**Sub total ** 689 689 12,202 - 12,891 3,663
A4 Asset and investment purchases,
(see table)
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Sub total -
-
-
-
-
Total payments
689
12,202
-
12,891
3,663
~~——————~~
Net of receipts/(payments)
- 81
-8,708
-
-8,789
- 2,475
A5 Transfers between funds
-358
358
-
-
-
A6 Cash funds last year end
2,154
8,350
-
10,504
12,979
Cash funds this year end
1,715
0
-
1,715
10,504
~~===>>~~

CCXX R1 accounts (SS)

03/11/2025

1

Section B Statement of assets and liabilities at the end of the period

Unrestricted Restricted Endowment
Categories Details funds funds funds
to nearest £ to nearest £ to nearest £
B1 Cash funds 1,715
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1,715
-
-
NatWest Account
Total cash funds
~~—====~~
(agree balances with receipts and payments (agree balances with receipts and payments
account(s)) OK OK OK
Unrestricted Restricted Endowment
funds funds funds
Details to nearest £ to nearest £ to nearest £
B2 Other monetary assets -
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
~~===~~
Details Fund to which
asset belongs		 Cost (optional) Current value
(optional)
B3 Investment assets -
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
~~ae~~
Details Fund to which
asset belongs		 Cost (optional) Current value
(optional)
B4 Assets retained for the
charity’s own use		 Unrestricted
-
3,847
Restricted
-
226
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Equipment
Props & costumes for play
~~matt~~
Fund to which Amount due When due
Details liability relates (optional) (optional)
Signed by one or two trustees on behalf of
all the trustees
B5 Liabilities
CCXX R2 accounts (SS)		 -
-
-
-
-
Date of
approval
09.07.2025
Print Name
RichardNigel Bell
Signature
2
03/11/2025
~~—=~~

Notes to the Accounts

Basis of preparation.

These financial statements have been prepared under the historical cost basis and in accordance with the Charities Act 2011 and related Regulations.

As the charity's level of income is below £250,000 the Trustees have opted for the accounts to be prepared under the receipts and payments method. This is in accordance with the Charity Commission guidelines for small charities and is seen as appropriate for this organisation.

The Trustees have also decided that there should not be an independent examination of the accounts on this occasion, because the charity's income is below £25,000 (in fact, only £4,102). This is in accordance with Charity Commission guidelines.

Fund accounting

Incoming resources that may be applied for the charity's general purposes are treated as unrestricted incoming resources and are credited to the unrestricted fund.

Where a donation or grant is required to be used for a specific purpose, the amount concerned is treated as restricted income and is credited to the appropriate restricted fund.

Movement of funds

Unrestricted funds
General fund - NatWest account
Transfer between funds
Restricted funds
Transfer between funds
TOTAL		 Balance at
01/04/2024
Incoming
resources
Expended
resources
Balance at
31/03/2025
2114
608
-689
2033
40
142
-500
-318
2154
750
-1189
1715
8390
3494
-12202
-318
-40
500
-142
318
8350
3994
-12344
0
10504
4744
-13533
1715

Trustees' remuneration, benefits and expenses

The were no trustees' remunerations in the period of these accounts.

CCXX R3 accounts (SS)

03/11/2025

3