Community shop 'much more than a can of beans'

Ground has been broken on a new community shop that volunteers said will "breathe new life" back into their village.

More than £230k has been raised to pay for the new shop and cafe for Kirtlington, Oxfordshire, which is due to open this summer.

Volunteers behind the scheme are now looking to establish a network of community-run shops across the region to help give the stores the best chance of surviving in challenging times for retail.

Volunteer Imogen Hammond said: "We need to ramp it up even more now. Initially it was about keeping us moving forward, now it's even more important."

Plunkett UK, a Woodstock-based charity that supports more than 870 community-owned businesses nationwide, has been working with the group.

Membership manager Laura Olver said community-run shops "face similar challenges to commercial enterprises".

She added: "The difference is that they are agile. They are owned by the community, the community have a real say in how they work, and they adapt and they evolve and they are remarkably sustainable and resilient.

"They're so much more than a can of beans and a packet of crisps.

"They're a social hub, they address rural loneliness and isolation, they help people feel part of the community through volunteering, by being a customer or by getting helped by those who work in the shop."

The former village shop in Kirtlington closed in 2020 and the group was initially formed to try and save it, before deciding on building a new, bigger shop and cafe on the village playing field.

Another £43k now must be raised to fully kit out the shop and stock the shelves.

Imogen Hammond from the group said: "We've seen a hell of a lot of these small organisations go bust - a lot of pubs that are derelict and it's sad. It's ripping the heart out of communities.

"We're so excited that our project is going ahead."

Hammond added that the group have already been learning from other community shops: "We look at what they're selling, what till systems they have in place, when are their busiest periods, what's the demographic of their customers?

"Just to hear that other people have taken that journey and got to a place of success has been the lifeline we needed to carry on with fundraising and turn people around and make the whole thing happen."

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