Shotley Bridge is one of eight pilot areas in County Durham where the County Council is seeking nominations to add to a new Local Heritage List.
This is a new national project known as the Local Heritage Listing project, a partnership project supported by Government and Historic England. The main purpose of the project is to begin to compile a list of County Durham’s heritage assets which are not currently protected either through legal or planning processes. These could be buildings, structures, items of street furniture, landscapes, open spaces or street signs, for example.
The Village Trust has been asked to promote the project and will itself be nominating potential sites. If you wish to be involved and have suggestions of what to include on the Local List you can nominate them on the project website. The website gives a thorough overview of the project as well as the nomination form and associated guidance.
You need to either use a grid reference or ‘what3words‘ to precisely identify the location of a site. Just click on the map and note the 3 words in the top left corner. Or you could use the app on your phone.
Deadline for submissions is 5.00pm on Sunday 21 November 2021.
Nominations that meet the established criteria will go to a panel made up of representatives from each pilot area, which will have an independent chair. Once the panel have made their decision, nominations that have made it to the Local Heritage List will be put on the Keys to the Past website.
Thanks once again to our County Councillors, Peter & Stephen, for providing a grant from their Neighbourhood Budgets to continue planting up the tubs in the conservation area with bulbs and plants for spring and summer next year.
Here is a selection of photos showing some of the tubs in bloom this spring.
The Derwent Valley Car Club is a community-based car club, set up by Blackhall Mill Community Association. The pay-as-you-go electric car club offers hourly and daily rates, with no mileage fees and full insurance cover. Thanks to funding from Innovate UK, they plan to install a double EV charge point in Shotley Bridge. The new EV charge point will be available for residents, the public and members of the Car Club.
They are seeking resident, visitor and business views on the location of the charge point, information on Electric Vehicles and potential demand for the car club. They have prepared a short survey which the Village Trust is helping to publicise.
If you are a local resident or regularly visit the village centre please spare 5 minutes to fill in the online survey, before 21 March.
This morning two dozen volunteers from the Village Trust helped plant the village tubs with over 600 polyanthus, together with tulip, daffodil, crocus and grape hyacinth bulbs.
Thank you to our local councillors for providing the funding from their DCC neighbourhood budget and to Beveridge’s Nursery for supplying the plants.
We managed to do all the planting before the rain set in.
At the beginning of August the summer bedding in the tubs and barrier baskets were looking very colourful.
Also two new seats have been put in the ‘triangle’ to replace the deteriorating wooden seats. The bespoke design of the new seats commemorate the lives lost in the First World War and the industrial past of Shotley Bridge. They were paid for with the remaining S106 monies from the Story Homes housing development at the hospital.
Last Sunday morning volunteers planted the summer bedding in the village, which had been postponed from the day before due to the wet and windy weather forecast. All the Trust’s tubs and planters were successfully planted with a mixture of Salvia, Geraniums, Dahlia, Petunia, Bidens and Lobelia from Beverages Nurseries.
Thank you to the 24 volunteers and to George Ledger for taking the photographs, who is currently trying to record the Covid-19 Lockdown and its affects on people locally. This year, to ensure social distancing, the committee of 6 decided to sort then transfer the plants to each of the tubs to make it safer for the volunteers to plant.
To add a little cheer during the coronavirus outbreak here are a few photos of the beds and tubs in the village that were planted by the Village Trust volunteers, in bloom with spring bulbs and flowers …
Due to the Coronavirus outbreak it has been decided to cancel the litter pick arranged for 28 March. We may reorganise it for September if the situation improves.
There will be no Village Trust Open Meeting in March this year. The next meeting for members and residents will be on 19th May at 7.30pm in the Catholic Church Hall, after the AGM that evening.
The annual spring litter pick is being held on Saturday 28 March this year, in association with Litter Free Durham’s ‘Big Spring Clean’. Volunteers who can spare an hour or two are meeting at the car park next to the Golden Flower at 10am. We aim to tidy up the village centre and along the roads leading out from it. Litter pickers, gloves, hi-viz vests and sacks are provided.
The Big Spring Clean is LitterFree Durham’s annual campaign, operated and delivered by Durham County Council and Darlington Borough Council.
Both councils work in partnership with LitterFree Durham to plan and execute the campaign every year.
The aim of the campaign is to reduce the amount of litter in the county by engaging with as many members of the community as possible through litterpicking activities and education in schools accross the area.
The campaign was first launched in 2010 to further LitterFree Durham’s work on the Stop the Drop Campaign that had been promoted by the Campaign to Protect Rural England. Since then it has grown year on year by attracting new groups and by maintaining engagement with previous participants.
On Saturday morning volunteers from the Village Trust planted up over 50 tubs with tulips, daffodils, crocus and grape hyacinth bulbs together with polyanthus plants.
Thank you to our local councillors and the Project Genesis Trust for providing the funding.
The photos show just a few of the volunteers getting wet!
The Village Trust has started using “Pooper Snooper”: a free mobile app designed to help communities tackle the issue of dog fouling. The Trust has marked all the existing dog waste and litter bins on a map, so that dog owners can find the nearest bin for wrapped waste.
It is also being used to mark the location of dog fouling. Over time ‘hot spots’ will build up showing the problem areas that will be reported to the council.
For further information, Durham County Council’s web site explains the law, how to get rid of dog waste and report problem areas, plus campaigns and schemes to tackle dog fouling … http://www.durham.gov.uk/dogfouling.
This morning volunteers cleared the weeds and cut back the shrubbery in ‘The Triangle’, in the centre of the village. The tubs are now not disgraced by the weeds around them.
At the AGM a cheque was presented by John O’Connor, Chairman of the Project Genesis Trust, to Sue Shaw, Secretary of the Trust’s Blooming Shotley Bridge group. The funding was made available from the Project Genesis Trust Small Grants Fund.
A similar amount has also been granted from County Councillor Robinson’s Neighbourhood Budget.
Both grants will now enable the Trust to replant the tubs and planters, throughout the conservation area, with summer and winter bedding this year.
Half a dozen Trust members spent a couple of hours this morning collecting debris, moss and leaves from the Triangle in the centre of the village. The block paving around the history board has been cleared of moss and weeds. Eighteen bags of compostable materials were removed, for the council to collect.
Thank you to the volunteers and to Isabella’s who provided complimentary coffees on completion.
The council intend cleaning the moss from the tarmac areas and repainting the fencing and furniture. Two new seats are also to be provided with the last of the S106 money from the Storey Homes development on the former hospital site.
The annual Spring litter pick by the Village Trust was carried out this morning. Thank you to the nine members who volunteered their time. The village is looking much tidier. Lets try and keep it that way. Only 10 bags collected this year compared to 20 in April 2018.
The Purple4Polio croci are flowering a month earlier this year, because of the mild weather. These are the 5000 bulbs planted in 2017 by the Village Trust provided by Consett Rotary Club. Another 5000 more bulbs were planted last November but these are only just starting to peep through.
The purple crocus is a symbol of Rotary’s worldwide campaign to eradicate polio, with its colour representing the purple dye used to mark the finger of a child to indicate they have received their life saving oral polio vaccine.
Consett Rotary Club has given the Trust another 5000 crocus bulbs, to plant in the village.
They have been planted further along the grass verge in front of Riverside, around the Pant and in the verge at Snows Green.
Ten members of the Trust and members of Consett Rotary, who provided the bulbs, volunteered for a couple of hours.
The purple crocus is a symbol of Rotary’s worldwide campaign to eradicate polio, with its colour representing the purple dye used to mark the finger of a child to indicate they have received their life saving oral polio vaccine.
Thank you to the 8 Trust members who came to the working party on Friday morning to weed the tubs, beds, triangle and paths in the village centre. The place is looking much more cared for now.
This morning the Trust’s volunteers planted the summer bedding in tubs and planters, within the conservation area. Thank you to those that helped and Beveridge’s for supplying and delivering the plants.
We are trying out a more experimental mixture of plants this summer, in the hope of adding more variety. We hope you like the difference.
Shotley Bridge Village Trust 