The new National Centre For Early Music is set to lure more people to York, as Charles Hutchinson found out from admin director Delma Tomlin, right.

On August 8 last summer, the locks were changed and York Arts Centre ceased trading overnight. Britain's first and longest-running arts centre now lies dormant, the former St John's Church in Micklegate merely carries the notice 'Property of the University of York'.

By contrast, St Margaret's Church in Walmgate is re-born today as the National Centre for Early Music in a £2 million revival of a redundant church, a Grade One-listed building used as a property store by York Theatre Royal.

The Archbishop of York, Dr David Hope, will give the opening address, marking the start of the Millennium of Sound Festival and celebrating the completion of a three-year project finished on time and to budget.

Here is a tale of two former churches, one turned into an arts centre in November 1968 on little more than faith and charity; the other blessed this evening by Dr Hope, supported by £1.5 million from the National Lottery Fund and £500,000 in partnership funding, and run by administrative director Delma Tomlin, in a further expansion of the York Early Music Festival and York Early Music Foundation.

Some may wish ever-troubled, innovative Arts Centre might have been constructed on such firm foundations, but it was a pioneering project of its time, a bold journey into the unknown. Lessons have been learned and absorbed by Delma Tomlin and the Foundation and subsequently put into practice by designers van Heyningen & Haward Architects, of North London, and builders Simpson Construction of York.

"The primary lesson is that the Arts Centre never had the chance to sort out the building before opening. It just took on an old church building," says Delma. "We've been able to create a 21st century building within a medieval church - the technology is so different today - and capital investment has made all the difference.

"The Arts Centre was always in an impossible position: the building was falling down around it, and there was the problem of the sound of traffic."

No such sound problems blight the National Centre for Early Music: the church windows are triple-glazed for sound-proofing and baffles (large panels stuffed with goats' hair) further improve the acoustics. Nothing can be heard from the street in this 200-seat concert, speech and drama hall, a light and airy room with under-floor heating, which will soon house rehearsals for this summer's York Millennium Mystery Plays.

With a commercial recording studio, instruments for workshops, shower room, access for the less abled, rehearsal facilities, educational activities, York Early Music Festival concerts and York Late Music Festival concerts (yet to be confirmed), the new centre meets the modern world in Walmgate.

The summer and Christmas Early Music Festivals are being funded separately, and with the Foundation's public funding limited to a £5,000 project grant from the City of York Council and £20,000 a year from Yorkshire Arts, the centre must largely make its own ends meet.

So there will be charges for workshops - because no money will be forthcoming from the education authorities.

Delma says: "We've been extremely careful to make sure this project came in on time and kept to budget, and we shall continue to be careful. Being a smaller-scale operation we run on smaller resources."

Run by a permanent staff of three and a 'half', the National Centre for Early Music will progress with due care and attention "until such time as we know how much it will cost to run each year, and how we will fund it.

"That might not be ambitious but we will not go bankrupt," she says. "I'm wary of all these National Lottery-funded projects that have ended up in trouble, such as the Royal Armouries in Leeds, the Earth Centre near Doncaster and the National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield. Maybe they should have kept quiet about their ambitions."

Delma believes the new centre will contribute to the tapestry of York life. "The church is in a part of the city that needed reviving. We're providing a good venue for York, and if you look at Walmgate, you will see the businesses now setting up here," she says. "The festivals, the Foundation and this building, will attract people to York."