By the end of 2016 there were more than 456 community owned and operated village shops in the United Kingdom with almost a third of these in the southwest. This number seems to be ever increasing with 23 new starts last year and a further 506 communities investigating setting up a shop in 2016. Again a high proportion of these were in the southwest. Most have been established with the assistance of the Plunkett Foundation and although they have a manager they are very much run by volunteers. Click here to go to the Plunkett web-site for more information. Here is a map showing the location of these shops with links to some of them. We would like to thank the Plunkett Foundation who provided us a range of advice and support including on subjects such as Access to Funding, Information and Resources and Legal Structures.

Our own Store has already been visited by a number of organisations keen to pick our brains in their planning to estalish their own community facility. Here in our part of the South West there are a number of community shops already in operation: Winsham, Thorncombe, Crowcombe, Stawley, Talaton, Dalwood, Hinton St George, Kingsbury Episcopi, Spaxton, Broadwindsor, Kingsdon and latterly Norton Sub Hambdon.

The Shop and Café at Brockweir in Gloucestershire was a good model for our Seavington enterprise and the Management Committee wishes to acknowledge its gratitude to the Hewelsfield & Brockweir Shop Association for its advice and ongoing support to our project.