Hidden Britain Central Warwickshire
Submitted by Kathryn Payne on Tue, 29th Jun 2010
Encouraging visitors to your village can bring real benefits. It can make all the difference to small local businesses, give your community fundraising a boost, help you to organise new village events or improve facilities like footpaths; even create local employment. Most importantly it can bring people together.
Hidden Britain will help you to create your own community-owned and run sustainable tourism project by providing:
- Advice and support from an experienced development officer
- A national network of other projects who can help and support you
- Your own free village pages on the Hidden Britain national website
- Funding to cover some of your project expenses
- A ‘how to’ handbook
- Opportunities to learn new skills such as developing websites, fundraising, public speaking, photography.
Hidden Britain is about recognising how visitors could benefit your village in really practical ways; and what you can offer them in return: beautiful landscape, interesting culture, colourful history, local specialities. It’s up to you.
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Case Study – Norton Lindsey
The people of this tiny South Warwickshire village had to find money towards the upkeep of the village church, and the local pub couldn’t justify opening at lunchtimes without more business. There was no group in the village to do fundraising and the pub had had little success advertising locally. The church is a little gem, with a history going back to the C11th, well worth a visit for all lovers of architecture and history. With help from Hidden Britain a group came together to research, write and print a guide book and to offer guided tours of the church using volunteers from the village. The project promoted the pub and organised teas in the church rooms on certain days in July and August. Norton Lindsey has its own entry on the national Hidden Britain website and was helped to publicise its project regionally and locally.
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“We all have gained a better understanding of local businesses, getting to know each other better and probably recommending each other more”
“It has improved the flow of ideas and communication between different parts of the community as well as delivering tangible results in terms of visitor numbers.”
If you would like to find out more about what Hidden Britain can do for your village, contact us! David Long will be visiting villages in the Central Warwickshire area through September to speak about Hidden Britain.
davidl@rase.org.uk 02476 853067
Watch a video about Hidden Britain here: http://www.hidden-britain.co.uk/default.asp?p=3 (scroll down to the BBC News 24 clip).
Hidden Britain is a project of the Arthur Rank Centre, a charity serving the rural community and its churches, based at Stoneleigh Park, Kenilworth, Warwickshire.
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