West Torrington is a small village on the edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds. Like many rural villages, we have lost our community facilities over the years and now only have a bus stop - which no bus stops at!
West Torrington Community & Heritage Action CIO formed to help coalesce village needs, to help restore long lost community services whilst maintaining and protecting heritage assets. We are a registered charity (registration number: 1194154).
For years we have wanted to regain an indoor community space that we could use as a multi purpose site for events, heritage skills training opportunities, education, a community shop and cafe.
We finally had our chance when the closed village church, the Church of St Mary, came on to the market in 2020.
We put forward a bid to secure the space forever for the benefit of the village and beyond and are delighted to say that we were informed in February 2021 that we were the preferred bidder and we are now under offer for it!
With this indoor community space, we will be able to support the rural community to tackle and minimise the multitude of disadvantage that isolated communities face.
From social events to address rural isolation, to a local pantry/foodbank to address the often hidden financial distress that members of rural communities can face, we hope to be able to offer flexible services and wider provision to help support and empower the community.
But to do that we need everyone's help. We are fundraising to support our bid and we are also asking people to gift their time in the form of a skills gift. Please do get in touch with us for more information.
To put not too fine a point on it, the broadband speeds in West Torrington are dreadful.
With speeds when it's running well at around 0.4mb/s most people have given up with the traditional approach and have opted for satellite or mobile router provision.
We have to pay a lot more for a limited service and we would like to change that. We are in the very early stages of assessing the options of a community broadband model. If you'd like to find out more about this, please get in touch.
Thomas Wimberley Mossman (1826-1885). The vicar of West Torrington from 1859 to 1885. He was responsible for the restoration of the church, using parts of the earlier medieval church on the same site and was an important and controversial figure in the Oxford Movement, a correspondent of Cardinal Newman, founder of Brotherhood training poor men for the priesthood, noted historian, active Liberal politician and crucial figure in the early Order of Corporate Reunion and Oecumenical movement.