Store is becoming a real community hub

Waiting for Video...

Published on 06/03/2013 13:25

A VILLAGE shop at Icklesham is playing an important role in bringing the community together.

Icklesham Village Stores marked its first year of being open in December and has now gained permanent permission to operate from Rother District Council.

The shop has been a welcome addition to the village for residents.

The village once had its own shop, newsagents and butchers but these have all closed in the past 20 years leaving villagers with the only choice of a long drive to either Hastings or Rye for their Groceries.

Icklesham Village Stores is run by Karen Clarke and Dexter Martin.

Karen said: “All the odds were against us when we started. We were on our own with no financial backing. We have built it up slowly and are getting there.

“We have had real support from the village and local community.”

The shop runs a community noticeboard and even a lost and found service, recently uniting a local man with his lost ferret.

The shop sells everything from drawing pins and bars of soap to logs, fresh fruit and veg and even hot drinks to take-away.

“We have been listening to what people want,” says Karen. “We try to stock as much local produce as we can. Cakes we sell are made by a local lady in the village.”

She added: “The lovely thing is that we get elderly people in the village coming in and children coming in to spend their pocket money and they talk to each other. It bridges the age gap.

“We have had collecting boxes supporting the Poppy Appeal and St Michael’s Hospice and what has been lovely is that youngsters will put their loose change in there.

“We had someone, who was not from the village, who stole some fruit and some local children went after him and got the fruit back.

“There are lots of elderly people in the village and their carers like shopping locally.

“We really feel appreciated now and get the feeling that if anything were to threaten the shop people in the village would get behind us, which is really nice.”

News

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Store is becoming a real community hub

Top stories

News