Villagers Open Community Shop
From the collection of
From the collection of
Villagers band together to form a cooperative and open a community village shop.
Villagers in Stetchworth, Cambridgeshire, have decided to counter the nationwide trend towards closing local rural shops in favour of urban supermarkets, and have opened their own village shop. Stocked with foodstuffs essentials, the new community-owned local shop, based in the Ellesmere Centre, will serve the villages of Stetchworth and Dullingham. This will be the only local shop in the area since the local Co-op closed three years ago and the last village shop shut 14 months ago.
Forming a co-operative, 16 villagers now run their own shop together, with some members putting up money to buy stock, while others volunteer time to run it. With no staff to pay and no overheads, the villagers believe they can make the shop succeed. The shop is part of a new multi-purpose village centre, built as a base for sports and social events, financed by the National Development Commission, East Cambridgeshire District Council and the County Council in an attempt to revitalise rural areas where facilities are run down.
The shop will prove vital for pensioners and mothers with young children who have limited access to personal vehicles and rely on public transport to go shopping in a supermarket. The volunteers hope that villagers will choose to support the shop and that it will serve as a meeting place and social area.
Reporter Greg Barnes interviewed Breda Bendon, Thalia Misson and some of the shoppers for this video, made to be shown in a news story on Anglia Television's early evening news / magazine programme About Anglia.
video, made to be inserted during live broadcast of Anglia Television's early evening news / magazine programme About Anglia. The live studio presentation provided context for the video as part of a news story or magazine feature within the programme. About Anglia was not recorded during broadcast, so it is usually just the pre-recorded programme inserts which survive. In the 1980s Anglia Television was broadcasting to a wide area in the East of England including Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Suffolk and adjoining parts of Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and Rutland where there was some overlap with neighbouring ITV regions.