Tarnmere village post office saved as residents open a community shop

Tarnmere's post office counter is open again, six months after the village lost its only shop. Residents of the Asher Valley village, which has around 1,100 people, raised €140,000 by selling shares to buy the building and reopen it as a community-owned store, and the doors opened on Saturday morning to a queue stretching along the green.

The previous owners retired in the spring after 26 years and were unable to find a buyer. For older residents without a car, the closure meant a bus journey of 40 minutes to collect pensions, post parcels or buy basic groceries, and the nearest cash machine was in Millbrook.

Owned by more than 300 households

A meeting in the village hall in May drew more than 200 people, and a steering group was formed that week. Shares were offered at €50 each, with no one allowed to hold more than €2,000 worth, and 312 households bought in. A further grant from a rural development fund paid for new fridges, shelving and a small café corner.

Imogen Rourke, a former school business manager who chairs the shop's committee, said the response had surprised even the organisers. "We hoped for maybe a hundred shareholders," she said. "People who have never stood behind a till in their lives have signed up to do a Tuesday afternoon."

A village without a shop is a place people sleep in. A village with one is a place people live in.

The shop employs a full-time manager and a part-time assistant, supported by a rota of around 60 volunteers. It will stock bread from a Millbrook bakery, vegetables from two Asher Valley farms and eggs from a smallholding at the end of the village. The post office counter, run under a standard agreement, is open six days a week.

Any profit will be reinvested in the shop or used for village projects, with shareholders voting on how it is spent each year. Several other villages in the valley have already asked the Tarnmere group how they did it, and the committee has offered to share its business plan and paperwork with anyone who asks.