The Village of Wark

Those of you who attended the two meetings about a Wark proposal for the Village SOS initiative will be relieved to hear that an application was indeed made in time for the deadline last Friday.  Village SOS is a joint initiative between the BIG Lottery Fund and the BBC and aims to encourage rural communities to put ideas together to stimulate the retention of local services and indeed of creating new ones where they’ve been lost.

As I understand it, six villages across the country will eventually be shortlisted to develop their plans further and eventually one of them will be the winner.  The price is a decent amount of money to make their idea a reality.  The involvement of the BBC obviously means that there will be a television programme attached: the six projects will be filmed at various stages of development and the whole thing will become a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ type programme.

The Wark proposal revolves round the Grey Bull and incorporates a cafe, an initiative reduce our collective carbon footprint and an increase in the take-up of renewable energy, and of course the continuation of the pub, but under community management.  Importantly the application also includes the training of a number of young people and the expectation that another 20 small businesses will be set up. That the application was made was largely due to the hard work of Philip Wanless, who wrote the application to a very short timetable.

Competition for this initiative is likely to be enormous; you might have read about Allendale’s proposal in last week’s Courant and I understand that Bellingham and Fourstones have also made applications.  However, the easiest way of not to get it, is not to try and I suppose we have as good a chance of getting is as any other.  Fingers crossed!

Although I haven’t seen it yet myself, I have been told that the new carpet tiles in the Library/ Pool Room, upstairs in the Town Hall has arrived and indeed makes the whole thing look very tidy again.  That means that the bookcase that the Town Hall Committee bought some time ago can now be moved from the stage in the main hall to the space between the windows.  That will provide a substantial amount of extra room for our Victorian collection of books and should make it possible to show them off much better.  The creation of an up to date database of the books has slowed down a bit over the past few weeks, but will start again shortly.  It’s expected that the Library will be formally re-opened sometime this autumn.