Headway Oxfordshire is hoping to help even more people after its 200,000 refurb

This building site will soon be transformed into an other-worldly sensory room, a physiotherapy centre, a training kitchen, meeting space and more.

The users of the facility will be people who have been in car accidents; people who have suffered cardiac arrest and meningitis and recovering drug overdose victims.

What unites them is that they have all suffered devastating brain injuries which changed the way they live in almost every way.

Headway Oxfordshire, whose base this is, hopes that its new facilities will enable it to help more of those people to live a normal life again.

Each year in Oxfordshire, 4,000 people suffer a brain injury.

Headway, which has been supporting those people since 1982, is currently able to offer help to just 450 of those people.

The charity has been based in the former church building at 4 Bagley Wood Lane, Kennington, since 2002.

The building was formerly owned by the Diocese of Portsmouth but at the beginning of this year Headway finally found the funds to buy the freehold, enabling them to transform it into their dream home.

Events and marketing officer Charlie Hayes said: "We had a lot of long-term plans for a long time, but not owning the building, we couldn't make any structural changes.

"It was starting to show its age and we wanted to give it some TLC."

That is exactly what the building is now getting: the new, extended training kitchen has already been installed, largely furnished by heavily-discounted white goods from Smeg in Abingdon.

There, people will re-learn, or sometimes learn for the first times, how to make themselves a healthy meal.

Mr Hayes explained: "Some of our service users have memory problems, some have mobility problems, some people are having to learn new skills.

"For all those people, a straightforward part of recovery is helping your body as well as your mind, so helping people eat healthily is really important."

The new physiotherapy room will have better equipment and allow the charity to run more sessions.

There are also new staff buildings going up around the main building to give everyone more space.

With hundreds of visitors every year, the new Headway base will be a busy place.

That is why it was so important to have the sensory room – a tranquil space where people can go to get away from it all.

Mr Hayes explained: "A whole part of brain injury is that loud and sudden noises can be very scary, so this will be a quiet place people can go, with or without someone else."

Overall, the charity is spending £200,000 on creating the new Headway Oxfordshire HQ.

Mr Hayes added: "It's vastly expanding what we have got here, and part of why we're doing it is to really say 'we're here for the long-term'.

"People are very, very excited about the plans: our long-term existing service users will make new friends because we'll be able to take more people."