| County | Somerset, South West |
|---|---|
| Postcode | TA4 2RU |
| Opened | 1998 |
| Post Office | Yes |
| Management | Managed plus volunteers |
| Legal | ViRSA IPS model rules |
| Premises | Conversion |
View a map of where to find us
9.30am - 1pm Monday to Friday
10am - 12 noon Saturday
5pm - 6pm Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.
Food, drink, Off licence, Post office, Dry Cleaning, Bread and Cakes, Locally grown fruit and veg.
Collection point for Milk delivery and newspapers.
Brompton Ralph is believed to be the smallest village in the country to have a community-owned shop. The village shop and post office is managed by Karen Smith (Sub-Postmistress) with help from many volunteers from within the village area.
The shop is open six days a week for a few of hours each morning and three evenings a week for one hour during the evening. Come and see what is on offer.
The village store is no longer a thing of the past as more communities work together to ensure their long-term future. Sarah Ford discovers a hive of activity in our rural villages.
In a quintessentially English rural scene, a tractor driver, horse rider and dog walkers and congregation around the front of a village shop next to a small triangle of grass where three country lanes meet. Brompton Ralph is one of Somerset’s smallest villages on the edge of Exmoor National Park, and the community here has run the post office and stores since 1998.
In the absence of a pub, the shop is the heart of the village; it’s a social centre where important notices are pinned up, where people can post their parcels, take their dry cleaning and even bring in surplus fruit and vegetables freshly picked from their own gardens.
Karen Smith takes the role of full-time paid manager and postmistress, and she is backed up by a list of volunteers who serve in the shop, collect milk and newspapers from Wiveliscombe, and make deliveries to outlying farms.
A steady flow of customers come and go as Karen and I stand outside in the sunshine with John Elliot, chairman of the shop management committee. They recall how villagers grouped together eight years ago to save the store when the current owners/managers, Mr and Mrs Beale, decided to retire.
Deciding it was too important to loose, some 75 people (the population of Brompton Ralph totals less than 180) donated £3,500 to get the post office and stores up and running.
“It is run by the community for the community,” says Karen. “We have had a variety of grants over the years for altering the premises, and for things such as deep freezers and cabinets. Now we are badly in need of a deli counter and another freezer, and that’s what our village fayre is for on 9th September.”
Apart from the occasional walker tackling the 23-mile Wivey Way circular route from Wiveliscombe, there is very little passing trade at the stores. Other outside visitors include the Tesco home-delivery van drivers who come in for directions. “We make them buy something,” Karen says smiling. “It’s only a bit of a joke really. I’m not competing with the supermarkets – I would never be able to do that – but we do cut our profits on some items to get people in. We are managing all the time on a knife edge, cash-flow wise, because we are operating on such a small customer base, and we do a credit scheme which affects the cash flow so we can only order a few items a month. But there are some people who rely on us entirely: they wouldn’t want to shop anywhere else.” Mr Beale, to whom the committee pays a rent for the premises, stands in for Karen in the post office when she is away.
Brompton Ralph is a member of ViRSA (the Village Retail Services Association) which is an activity of the Plunkett Foundation, a charity that supports villages wishing to establish a community-owned shop. Some 77% of these are in settlements of between 200 and 900 people, and Brompton Ralph is probably the smallest community to have a store of this kind.
Article by Sarah Ford from Somerset Life, August 2006
Karen Smith
Shop Manager
01984 623267