IN the very depths of her depression, Noony Knowles dreamed of a place where people could go to get help.

Such a place would provide them with counselling and a listening ear and would be a refuge for people such as herself.

More than a quarter of a century on, her dream is on the verge of creation in an old hall next to the United Reformed Church in Oxford Road, Cowley. It could be open by the year 2000.

Called the Oxford Healing and Counselling Centre, it will offer advice, a doctor's surgery, nursing, alternative medicine and even spiritual guidance, all under one roof.

The £1.2m centre is designed as a "shopping centre" for the body, mind and soul, where instead of being referred to a specialist across the city, people will just have to go across the hall.

Noony, of The Paddox, Summertown, suffered 20 years of migraines, insomnia and depressive illness.

It was during these years that a conversation with a friend planted the seed of her idea. She said: "I was desperately fighting the impulse to walk at night. I telephoned a doctor friend who said the point was to have somewhere to walk to."

A radical approach suggested by her GP - changing her diet instead of continuing with drugs - eventually cured the former economic history lecturer of her depression, and led her to set up an allergy support group in 1980.

By the time she left the group, which disbanded in 1996, she was putting her energies into the centre, which is based on one at St Marylebone Church in London.

Now she wants part of the building to be given over to a clinic where the diets of children with behavioural difficulties would be analysed.

And she wants it to become a focal point for the community.

"Sometimes at the support group people wished to talk with me alone and I welcomed them to my home. I had noticed that some members seemed sad and ill. They had suffered traumatic experiences and needed counselling and comfort. "This led me to think about setting up a centre and when I visited the one in London I was very impressed. I thought we must have one like this in Oxford.

"It would be a place to go which could also contain complementary approaches to illness, including exercise and dance, for we are body, mind and spirit."

The biggest hurdle is funding, a concern for project development manager the Rev Betsy Gray King.

Mrs Gray-King is the minister at the United Reformed Church and says she is delighted to be involved.

The aim is to make the centre not only accessible but also self-financing, through income from a restaurant, from tenants and from fees for complementary treatment.

She said: All we need now is the money, which will take a lot of effort to get. But it's a very exciting project because everyone involved is fully committed to it. I'm confident we'll get there." A full range of help GROUPS signed up for a place in the 19 rooms at the Oxford Healing and Counselling Centre cover the spectrum of help.

Set to be included are:

Drugs and alcohol group Libra;

The Oxford Christian Institute for Counselling;

Oxford Survivors, for people using mental health-care services;

Community nurses;

A complementary therapy group offering homeopathy and acupuncture; and

A crisis listening service

There will also be a restaurant and a chaplaincy, and a kitchen garden will be sown outside to provide therapeutic relief for people invited to tend it.

People using the glass-fronted centre will be welcomed at a reception area with glass walls, revealing the chapel and the restaurant, and the building has been designed so it doesn't have a clinical, "hospital" atmosphere.

The group hoped to set up in a hall next to St Luke's Church in Garsington Road, but the United Reformed building was chosen when that proved too big.

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