A year very much dictated by the effects of covid19, however particularly positive has been the taking over of vacant plots and the physical and psychological benefits so gained. Our first meeting was an informal A.G.M. held in the open air in June when the future of our group was in doubt but with Alison Smith stepping forward as secretary and Louise Denning and Alan Pike as joint treasurers we were able to go forward. Two further outdoor meetings were held in July and August with matters discussed including:
- the taking over of plots and their clearing, rent increases (and it must be said they remain excellent value),
- the use of equipment and safety on site, dogs and chickens.
- the closing of the gate and padlock.
We also opened up the site to join in with the village Events Group Scarecrow weekend in September when several of our scarecrows were shown.
Our Facebook page set up by Alan is proving a welcome source of communication, as is the notice board which is regularly updated and a recent newsletter hopefully will keep plot holders in touch. For those who have joined the B.B. Heath Allotment Holder’s Association we are now reregistered with the National Association to which £3 of our £5 subscription goes.
We are grateful to all those who help towards the general maintenance of the site, not forgetting the years of service given by those who have now stepped down, to Sammy who provides us with a regular supply of horse manure and not forgetting our Parish Council who make so much possible, Stacey, Rachel, Sue M. and Colin before his retirement. We especially welcomed the recent skip and may it be an annual addition.
We look forward to the future - developing a positive community spirit, plans for the enhancement of the site, plant/seed/produce swaps and encouraging wildlife flora and fauna.
In closing it is hoped we will be able to meet again for our A.G.M. on Saturday June 12th – details nearer the time.
Like many community facilities, the library has been closed for much of the year due to Covid-19 restrictions and lockdowns. However, it was possible to open for a few months with limited opening hours to offer a Click and Collect service to allow borrowers to collect items pre-reserved online and return their books in line with a very strict quarantine procedure required by the Parish Council and Lincolnshire County Council ( LCC). Some volunteers felt comfortable in going to the library to provide this service and many appreciative comments were received from users. During this period, it was one of the most well-used Community Libraries in the county.
Because of lockdown, the Summer Reading Challenge, which is usually run so successfully in the library, was only available online this year.
During the year, LCC implemented a complete upgrade to library IT systems. Volunteers who were available were re-trained by Judith Hibbitt, our Library Development Officer. Others will be re-trained in the future when the library is able to open again and, indeed, it is likely that all volunteers who have had the training will need a refresher course.
The continued enthusiasm, dedication and commitment of all the library volunteers is very much appreciated by the Parish Council - without them, it would not be possible to provide the service to the public.
Just before lockdown, several people expressed an interest in volunteering and we look forward to meeting them and welcoming them to our team when restrictions allow.
Many thanks are due to Stacey Knowles, the Parish Clerk and Rachel Fraser, the Assistant Clerk for their hard work in preparing ongoing Risk Assessments for the library and putting procedures in place to make it Covid-secure for the volunteers and the public when it was possible to be open.
The support of our Library Development Officer, Judith Hibbitt, in delivering training and continuing to visit the library to deal with items returned through the letterbox during lockdown is also very much appreciated. In fact, she has used it as a place of work on a fairly regular basis.
We now look forward to the time when the library can re-open, hopefully in the Spring dependant on the progress of the Government’s Roadmap out of lockdown and guidance from LCC.
Alison Peden, Library Volunteer Coordinator
Bracebridge Heath Events Group
Along with many other groups we have had a somewhat quieter year than usual and our meetings, including our AGM in November, have been conducted over Zoom. We have all become well acquainted with this platform over the past year!
Our group membership is small, five in total, and anyone interested in helping would be made very welcome. Our main aim is to bring the community together in some events for the whole family to enjoy.
We were able to organise the annual Scarecrow Trail in September as this was an outdoor, socially distanced event. We decided not to charge for the trail maps to avoid close contact and cash changing hands. People were able to pick up their maps from the Co op foyer and deposit them in the box there on completion. It was a well- attended event and as there was no set theme this year, we had an exciting array of scarecrows. Thank you to all the scarecrow makers for their fabulous creations.
Our next event in the year is the Community Carols, held at St John’s church. As we were unable to gather together this year we went ahead with the help of You Tube. Local duo 54 North, (Heather and Crauford), recorded the carols and songs (within all Covid regulations for professional musicians in force at that time) for people to join in with online. This was interspersed with readings from St John’s churchwardens, Sue Shaw and John Robinson. With 185 views we were very pleased that
so many joined in and we hope it was enjoyable for all.
Going forward, we are waiting to see if it will be possible to hold our annual Easter Egg Hunt on 3rd April. We realise that restrictions may be such that gatherings, albeit outside in the woodland, are disallowed.
We hope to resume our planting and tidying days later in the summer. Guidelines may mean that we cannot mingle as a group but individually we hope to plant up the tubs and containers and help with gardening at St John’s. We were lucky enough to receive generous funds from the Co op
Community Champions scheme last year and are looking forward to putting our planting plans in place and doing our bit to make our little corner of the world a bit prettier!
Our thanks go to Lincolnshire Co op, Parish Council, Revd Jacqueline Bell and all at St John’s and to all who support our events. Keep up to date on Facebook, Heathcliff View and Parish news.
Very best wishes.
Karen Thomson, Secretary
Heath U3A
The purpose of our organisation is to enable friendship, companionship and good fun whilst enjoying all manner of activities. We are people of a certain age who are retired from full time work, and usually have groups regularly partaking in all things ranging from sports to the arts and history to languages. There are even board games and visits to places of commercial and industrial business to enjoy. Whether one is looking to maintain or develop an interest further is fine by us as looking forward, improving or seeking a new skill is always beneficial.
We are always looking for new members, so please feel free to get in touch in spite of the current constraints due to Covid 19. Obviously we have this last year, been unable to meet in the usual way, but have however, within some of our groups, met on Zoom and/or by email. We publish a professional, informative and interesting Newsletter regularly, and are looking to resuming our normal activities as soon as possible.
The mainstay of our ‘normal activities’, is a meeting for our whole organisation on the second Monday of every month. This is a most convivial occasion, with tea or coffee and biscuits, a good old chat and a speaker or event, and is held at 10am at the Methodist Church Hall on Grantham Road, Bracebridge Heath, LN4 2LE.
This year, we have a membership fee of £8.00, but when we are able to ‘get back to normal, next years fee with revert to £12.00. We are a charity, and a member of the national parent organisation, The Third Age Trust. We are looking forward to meeting up face to face again soon and would love you to come and join us.
Have a look at our website, heathu3a.org.uk, or to get in touch, email our membership secretary at email, heathu3amembers@gmail.com, or telephone 01522 52881 or 01522 520589.
Keep safe and best wishes.
Nigel Cobbold, Chair
Hurricane Sports Foundation
Hurricane Striders
• Striders is the HSF England Athletics official Club
• The club has 94 members with 47 from BBH Postcodes
• Sessions on a Tuesday evening with a regular group of 20 now in attendance.
• Sessions still active online but with limited attendance (around 20 covering all sites across our programme)
Holiday Clubs
• February 2020 ran as normal numbers were excellent with every day sold out
• Due to CV 19 and the restrictions no camps have been possible since.
• We hope to restart these sessions once restrictions are lifted
Over 50s Get Active
• Sessions were delivered January to March 2020 on Monday Mornings 10-1130am
• Sessions have been gradually increasing with 25 registered 12-15 regularly attending weekly
• Unfortuntaley sessions have stopped due to CV 19 we have kept engaged with some residents and offered two bundles.
• Bundle 1 a 1:1 session with one of the delivery team however these sessions started again in September 2020 and had to stop in lockdown 2
• Bundle 2 residents can have access to a pack of equipment for a week and we drop off and pick up along with cards to have ‘fun’ activities at home.
• We hope to restart these sessions once restrictions are lifted
Community Programmes Active
Rounders
• These sessions were expected to be delivered in April – September 2020 but due to CV 19 these sessions were unable to continue
• These sessions have been popular for families in recent years and we hope to restart these in summer 2021 as a way of supporting the local community
Dodgeball
• These sessions were expected to be delivered in April – September 2020 but due to CV 19 these sessions were unable to continue
• The hall is now too small for these sessions due to numbers so we have to use the field which is ok on nice evenings but weather creates issues with the session numbers and long term sustainability
Gary Johnson, CEO Hurricane Sports Foundation
Bracebridge Heath Preschool
This year has been a real challenge for preschool.
We have faced many challenges with the impact of the coronavirus, meaning that we had to close completely for a while last April and May.
From September 2020. We have been faced with the continuing challenges of coronavirus, increased numbers of children and the prospect of moving.
In August 2020 we were informed that Lincolnshire County Council had bought the forma Police station for our sole use as a childcare provision. Since then, we have been busy with planning permission and getting quotes for the internal and external renovations. These have met with some challenge including the boundary between the library and car park. We had a meeting with the Parish council in October to discuss this, but took until the end of January to complete, which slowed up the planting of the laurel hedging. Thankfully our supplier knew we would require the trees so ordered them in from the Netherlands before Brexit, so we didn’t in cure additional import costs.
We have now contracted companies to carry out the internal and external works and hope to start work within the next four weeks. We will probably we able to move in before the summer break, but will re-launch our new provision in September to co-inside with the new academic financial year. We hope to offer places for up to 36 places for 3–4-year-olds and 12 2-year-old places. Offering hours between 8.00am to 5pm extended and term time funding hours.
We would like to thank the Parish Council for the £400.00 grant which will go towards building our new sensory garden, to promote well-being and sensory experiences for children and staff.
Unfortunately, from the 12th February coronavirus entered preschool with infected all staff, some of us have been quiet poorly. This meant we had to close for a week after the February half term. Preschool re-opened on the 1st March. The Government has said that all children can return to schools from the 8th March, so we will then be able to welcome back all children. Although provision will be strained, due to us being full to capacity and no way of maintaining any social distancing.
We look forward to a more promising future.
St John the Evangelist Church
Preparing for today I reflected on how, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, life has changed drastically for us all. Now in a 3rd lockdown St John’s Church, along with the whole of our community, have had to adapt to very difficult circumstances. My heart goes out to you all and your own particular struggles and challenges at this time.
In early January, we took the decision as a PCC, for reasons of safety, to close temporarily for worship once again. Though the building may be closed we remain very much open for you as the Parish Church in Bracebridge Heath.
During this past year we have developed our church Face Book page into a growing online community, supporting one another and enjoying daily prayer and Sunday worship together.
A team of us also offer support to all by regularly ring round and delivering worship resources by invitation. Our connection with the community through FB enabled us to recently recruit volunteers to an Acorn trust mental health signposting service - Night Light Café to run from our church building as soon as possible. I would like to say thank you to all those in our community who have volunteered in this and other ways. With your help we continue to collect for Branston Foodbank who support local families as well as those further afield.
Unable to hold our usual community activities and monthly Community Coffee Morning we introduced a regular Zoom coffee morning. All are welcome, please contact me by email, j.bell313@btinternet.com, for joining details.
In September we welcomed many of you to our Harvest Festival, held this year in the church car park, all Harvest produce donated to Branston Food bank. Thank you to our Churchwardens and PCC for their help in this.
In November, as a result of Covid-19 and the difficulty in ensuring the safety of everyone involved, the parish church and parish council were unable to hold our annual Remembrance Sunday service and parade. Representatives from St John's Church and the armed forces took part in an act of wreath laying at the village war memorial in honour of lives lost. This was filmed and posted on the Parish Council and St John's FB pages. Members of our community were invited to place poppies, wooden crosses and other momentos at the war memorial in their own acts of remembrance.
In December the annual Bracebridge Heath Events Group Community Carol Service was filmed from St John’s Church and posted on FB. This proved to be an excellent event and our thanks go to the very talented Crawford and Heather. On Christmas Day we welcomed many of you to our service in church. Unable, for safety reasons to
hold our annual Christmas Eve Crib and Midnight services our church carpark became home for the evening of the scarecrow nativity. Thankyou to all those who attended that evening and contributed to the collection for Branston Foodbank. Thank you again to our Churchwardens and PCC.
Though unable to produce and deliver the monthly Parish News this publication remains available on the Parish Council and Church Facebook pages and by request by email. We continue to support the Parish Council’s Neighbourhood Plan raising and stressing with NKDC the importance of community cohesion and adequate infrastructure for existing residents and people arriving in the area.
With the new housing developments in mind, in February 2021, St John’s Church, the Methodist Circuit and Lincoln United Reformed Church (jointly making up the South East Lincoln Partnership of churches), appointed a Pioneer, or Community Minister, to work alongside the established church in our ministry. I and all at St John’s Church welcome Matt Rigden and his family to Bracebridge Heath.
I invited the Methodist Circuit to say a few words about this project: ‘ Here at the Lincoln Methodist Circuit we are delighted to welcome Matt Rigden and his family to Bracebridge Heath and the new community ministry. We have been working with the URC and Anglican churches for some time on the project, first with rev Melanie Greenall and then with me, Ian Lacy, as the senior lay person in the circuit. It is exciting to see all our efforts begin to see results. We’ll continue to support the work: Rev Jennifer Matthews, our new minister starts in September
and will have have links into Bracebridge Heath. Even though the chapel is closed as a church we want to keep the building on as a community resource.’
As we look ahead to Mothering Sunday, Holy Week and Easter Day we are thinking creatively at St John’s about ways in which we can mark these occasions with you all. Please look out for further information in Heathcliff view and Parish News publications, our church noticeboard and Facebook pages.
God bless,
Reverend Jacqueline Bell, Vicar.
St John’s Primary Academy
At the very start of this report I would like on behalf of all the Governors at St John’s to publically thank all the staff at St John’s for all the hard work and effort they have put into supporting our pupils and their families throughout this pandemic. This included keeping the school open during the first lockdown half term holidays for our key worker children. The support they have given to our families throughout this pandemic has been immense and much of it has been behind the scenes and quietly and confidentially done.
Also our thanks go to our village community who have supported our pupils’ online learning by providing us with their unused laptops and tablets and by providing items to go into food parcels.
Despite our school’s best endeavours throughout this year and latterly twice a week testing of staff, Covid still managed to defeat our defences at the end of January when we went from having clear test results to having to close the school within four days because so many staff were unwell or having to self-isolate. At the time of writing there are still members of staff off work trying to recover from this virus. We wish them all the best for a full recovery.
Last year I stated that our school had been awarded the Caring2Learn Gold Award and Mrs Marcer our Headteacher had been appointed a Caring2Learn champion. This year St John’s was also to be recognised again as we had been chosen to host a visitor from OFSTED as part of that Caring2Learn project to look at how we carried out this work. However this had to be cancelled due to the pandemic.
It has been a busy year with regards to the school estate. We were successful in our bid to get a Government Grant to reroof the school’s flat roofs which were as they say ‘past their sell by date’. This work is due to take place as soon as it is safe to do so. We are also using our reserves to build an extra classroom so that we then have the space for small groups of children to work in an environment more suited to their needs. Planning permission has now been given for this new classroom to be built. We are awaiting the result of a further planning application to change the use of our caretakers house so that it can be used as an after school club. This will increase our after school provision for our pupils. Thanks must go to our Business Manager Mrs J Williams and our Governor Mrs T Footsoy for all the hard work they have put into getting these projects together. All being well these projects should be completed by the end of the summer.
This year we said goodbye to one of our longer serving governors Mr S Dixon who had served on the governing board for approximately twelve years. We thank him for his commitment to our school and wish him all the best for the future. Procedures are in place to recruit some new governors but with the lockdown and the outbreak of Covid within the school this has been delayed.
Our school has endeavoured to teach as normal a curriculum as it could throughout the year and will continue to do so when our pupils return. Work is needed to find out which areas of the curriculum each individual pupil has missed to ensure that this is taught, but it will be done over a period of time as it is not a quick fix. We are also fully aware that time will be needed for both pupils and staff to come to terms with what has happened in their lives in the last year and as a Governing Board we will be doing our best to ensure that the school can provide what help it can as and when the help is needed.
Finally I hope by next year at this time I will be able to report on more traditional school activities and that I will be inviting you all to attend the school’s usual school activities such as the summer fete.
Sue Manders, Chairman of Governors
Bracebridge Heath Women’s Institute
What a year we’ve had! It started well enough, as we welcomed the Family History society and the lovely lady from the Blind association to come and give us talks in their specialised areas. What fond memories I have of those times. However it wasn’t too last and in March we saw the start of a global pandemic. It was with a heavy heart, and safety of all our members in mind, that we stopped all face to face meetings in March. Our committee has worked hard, behind the scenes, to keep the WI wheels working and looked into new, exciting ways to keep the group entertained, educated and (most importantly) in touch with each other.
Over the past 9 months we’ve sent you a cup of tea and biscuits to celebrate turning 10, raffle tickets, watercolours, Christmas flowers, green felt and several newsletters (including this one). We’ve started monthly online meetings and had a range of success with technology. Between us we’ve learnt how to ‘sing’ Jerusalem in sign language, watercolour like a pro, had a game of bingo and entertained two wonderful speakers, to name but a few. Giving a talk to a computer sceen is far more nerve racking then face to face, so a big WI thank you went out to the Suffolk Prickles Hedgehog Rescue and Lincs and Notts Air Ambulance who came onboard to do just that.
Lyndsey Sidney, President of Bracebridge Heath WI
