Category: News

We are pleased to announce that we have received two awards in a competition run by the Library Campaign, a national charity supporting Friends and users of libraries across the UK. 

Fund-raising category: Calendar

We were awarded joint first prize in the ‘fundraising’ category for the calendar which we produce each year with scenic photographs of the area taken by local residents. The judges remarked that they were particularly impressed by how the wider community helps with this, in both producing and selling the calendar.

There are still a few 2026 calendars on sale in the library, Peppers and the Outdoor Depot.

Download our winning entry on fundraising here

Joint work category: Dementia Collection

We were also awarded a Special Mention for helping to provide a Dementia Collection in the library, working with ‘Stretton Dementia Friends’. The collection includes Information about Dementia, Information for Carers, books for children and young people, Picture to Share books, Relish jigsaws and specially adapted games. All of these have been added to the Shropshire Library catalogue and can be taken out on loan free of charge.

Download our winning entry about the Dementia Collection here

All the winning entries will be shared with other Friends groups across the UK. We hope this will lead to lots more libraries having Dementia Collections.

Shropshire Council are not providing bin collection calendars this year.

Bin collection dates are available on their website – but not in a format you can easily download and print.  

We have produced a calendar for both Tuesday and Friday collection days which can be printed.

A copy is also on display in the library, and  can be photocopied there.

Please let anyone you know without internet access how they can get a copy

Trustees needed – can you help?

We are delighted that our recent fundraising work has supported a three-year agreement between Church Stretton Town Council and Shropshire Council to keep our lovely local library open.

We are totally run by a small committee of volunteers and want to recruit two additional people to join us .

Our Main Activities

• Raise funds to support and enhance the work of the library

This involves planning, organising and publicising a host of events from quiz nights to sea shanty concerts, including the creation of our ever-popular calendar!

• Run activities of educational and cultural interest

Recent talks we have organised have covered a variety of topics such as local geology, the Narnia books of C.S. Lewis, healthy living, Syria, book illustrations and Medical Royal colleges.  Our events are nothing if not varied!

• Opening the Visitor Information Centre (VIC) on Mondays and Wednesdays

To do this, we have volunteers who open the VIC on days when the library is closed.  This helps make visitors to Church Stretton feel welcome and thus supports local traders in the town.

We are a registered CIO charity, fully insured and Trustees are not financially liable for the running of the charity.

What does being a Trustee involve?

We want people who would be able to commit around eight hours a month, some of which could be worked from home. Computer access for email and documents is essential.  Anyone with a working knowledge of social media would be very welcome, but it is not an essential requirement.

Trustee meetings take place once a month and last one to two hours.

As well as attending Trustee meetings, Trustees are expected to help in some way with the running of the charity. This could be helping with admin, running events or helping with publicity, depending on your personal skills and preference.

We are a friendly group of local volunteers where everyone’s contribution is welcomed and we work around our members’ work and family commitments. 

Our activities are both interesting and rewarding.

If you might be interested, please get in touch to find out more.  You are welcome to attend a few Trustee meetings before making any final commitment.

We are delighted to tell you that a verbal agreement has been reached between Church Stretton Town Council and Shropshire Council regarding the future of the library in Church Stretton.

Under this agreement, Shropshire Council will continue running the library for the next few years with a contribution from the Town Council of £20,000 per annum. Friends of Church Stretton Library have committed to contributing £5,000 a year towards this in order to reduce the load on the Town Council precept.

We are now waiting for a formal written contract to be signed.  Once signed, the library’s future will been secured for at least another three years.  One possible obstacle to this is if Shropshire Council declares itself insolvent by raising a section 114 before the contract is signed.  

Since the campaign to keep the library in Church Stretton began back in 2014, we have often been uncertain whether the library would be funded the following year.  Now, ten years, on we have secured an agreement for at least three years, after which another conversation can be expected on the library’s future.

We would like to thank the Mayor, Andy Munro, for his hard work in securing this agreement and the Town Council for supporting the proposal.

We would also like to thank all our supporters, especially our regular donors, who have helped us through the years.

If you would like to help us raise the money required, you can donate on our website at How To Donate – Friends of Church Stretton Library, or fill in a donation form at the library and leave a cheque payable to ‘Friends of Church Stretton Library’.

Thank you

Sheila Davies Chair, Friends of Church Stretton Library

Focus have recently developed a ‘Whats On’ calendar – see Calendar of Events in The Strettons

 The Focus calendar now allows organisations to add their events months in advance, so they can alert other organisations of their plans and avoid two similar events taking place on the same day.

Organisations can then add more details about their event later on, to help promote their event to the community. 

It makes sense for only one organisation in the Strettons to have a planning calendar – and Focus is the obvious website to host this.   

We have therefore taken down the Friends Stretton Planning Diary down from our website – and are encouraging organisations to use the Focus one . 

To add an entry you can use the template on their website at  Submit an Event | Stretton Focus  ‘

Local residents support increase in town precept

There was a total of 1021 responses to the survey the Town Council delivered to 1,980 homes in the parish in September.  This included 504 surveys on paper and 517 returned online.  This rate of return of 52% is huge compared to the average turn out for a public consultation which is more typically 10-15%.

82% of respondents said they would be prepared to see their local precept raised in order to help protect the town’s leisure centre, library and swimming pool.

Residents were asked to prioritise which service was most important to them.  Approximately half of respondents (52%) expressed a preference which showed a fairly even spread across all three services.

Service	Priority
Library	36.0 %
Swimming pool	32.2%
Leisure centre	31.8%

Of the remaining surveys, 37% of respondents said that ‘All services were equally important to them’, whilst 11% indicated that ‘None were of interest to them’. However, many of the respondents who said none of these services were of interest to them still offered to pay additional money in the precept to save them.

This included older residents who emphasised the need for all these services to be retained for younger residents and children, even though they themselves were now too old to use the leisure centre.

This result gives the Town Council a huge mandate to try to negotiate an agreement with Shropshire Council to save all three services.

 The full results of the Town Council survey can be viewed on the Town Council  website – see  Services-at-Risk-1.pdf

What happens now?

Over the last few months, the mayors of the nine towns in South Shropshire have been meeting with Shropshire Council to negotiate on the subject of ‘venue based’ services such as libraries, leisure centres and swimming pools.

Shropshire Council had calculated that if all Town and Parish Councils increased the local element of their precept by 10% this would raise over £1m which is more than the savings they need to make for leisure and library services as written in their Medium Term Financial Plan.

However, three weeks ago Shropshire abandoned this approach because:

• Some of the larger towns (although none in South Shropshire) refused to participate because they felt secure that their facilities would not be withdrawn even if they didn’t contribute anything, because of their population size.  
• Some market Town Councils (but not Church Stretton) are already either operating their libraries, leisure centres and in one case their swimming pool, or contributing financially towards their running costs. This has come about in previous years after their local services were threatened with closure.

Asking towns already contributing financially towards their venue based services to contribute again would lead to an even greater inequity across these towns.

Shropshire Council have now said that they wish to continue negotiations but are looking for individual solutions for each council which takes this into account. The mayors from the nine councils in South Shropshire have agreed to continue to work together, as this gives them a stronger negotiating position which will help in finding a more equitable solution across towns in South Shropshire.

A meeting between the mayors and the Leader of Shropshire Council to discuss these services has been scheduled for the second week of November.

Larger towns not contributing – is this fair?

It seems unfair that residents in the larger towns will get all of their venue based services provided without them having to raise their Town Council precept, whilst residents in the smaller market towns are expected to help finance theirs.

If the larger Town Councils refuse to assist, one option might be for Shropshire Council to look to make savings on venue based services in these towns. For example, the libraries in the bigger towns in Shropshire are currently open 5 or 6 days a week, whilst those in the smaller market towns are mostly open 4 days a week or less.  Shropshire Council could perhaps opt to make savings by reducing the opening hours of libraries in the bigger towns.