Rusper Village Stores Ltd
Hitting a milestone
In 2009 Rusper Village Stores served its 1,000,000th customer since it became a community-owned shop. Formed in 1999, the store offered a viable alternative to supermarket shopping as well as enhancing the social fabric of this popular Sussex village.
Services Offered
We stock local beers and wines, a superb range of locally produced bangers, local hand made "Real Pie Company" pies, local dairy, eggs and meat. Available products - Groceries, fruit and vegetables, chilled and frozen local meats, newspapers, confectionary and snacks, hot and cold drinks and off licence.
Village Store Revival
With the trend towards out-of-town hypermarkets run by the giant retailing groups, village stores have struggled to compete and in may cases have been forced to shut up shop. The effect on village life has been dramatic as such shops are as important socially as they are convenient. The importance is illustrated by mother of three young girls, Barbara Lloyd. “I want my children to be able to walk down to a local store. It is where they can learn about money, about shopping, be it buying some sweets with their pocket money or some groceries for me. It teaches them responsibility, manners, how to deal with people and live in society.”
Surveys such as The Changing Village report by the Women’s Institute provide damning summaries of the demise of local rural services, the resultant collapse of rural communities and escalation of social problems from crime to the inability to access basic fresh food. According to the Rural Development Commission, the local shop is now extinct in 42% of English parishes.
One small village in West Sussex has decided to put its future into its own hands and taken on the ownership and running of the village store, in an attempt to keep the village alive. Managed by the villagers, employing local people and with profits invested back into the village, the 1,000 or so residents of Rusper in West Sussex are confident that their store will not simply survive, but thrive. Why? Because they know what life would be like without a local store. As to their commitment, they have already raised in excess of £15,000 in start-up capital.
“Most people can see the necessity of a good village store to our lives, be they pensioners or young mums with small children,” says Chairman of the Rusper Village Stores Association, Arthur Dickson. “But now we see it as our responsibility as a village to keep the shop going as a thriving concern. We cannot rely on a proprietor or a chain of stores – residents of Rusper have now assumed responsibility for the success of their store.
“It’s our store, stocking the products we want, offering the services we need and where possible supporting local producers. We really do have a choice – from what the store sells to how the community spends the profits. Either we use the store and it will thrive, for the good of all, or we allow it to die which would be to the detriment of village life as we know it.”
Rusper is the second pilot store to be developed in partnership with Community Owned Retailing (COR), with Longley in Sheffield being the first. As COR originator Toby Peters explains, “local shops and local services must be the architecture of neighbourhood renewal. Retailing can no longer simply be about sterile buildings, plastic service, mass produced food and profits for the City. It is also about the heart of communities and the health of the nation. When superstores open, small shops and jobs in retailing disappear.”
A report by the National Retail Planning Forum examined the effects of jobs in food retailing within a 10-mile radius over a four-year period following the opening of 93 edge-of town superstores. Taking into account all the new jobs provided by the superstores, there was a net average loss of 276 jobs per store, making a national total of 25,000 job losses (Porter & Raistrick 1998).
Rusper Village Stores, set in a quintessential Sussex Village could not be more contrasted to inner-city Sheffield, but the communities share common ground. Both communities have poor public transport. Both want easy access to competitively priced healthy food and other services such as a post office. Both want to provide a vibrant and safe neighbourhood for their children to live in. Both have residents willing to take responsibility for their destiny and get things going.
Says Steve Sharp, Marketing Director of Booker plc – instrumental in the development of Community Owned Retailing, “the two pilot stores might not be seen as a retailing revolution but who six months ago would even have thought that communities in inner-city Sheffield and a store in rural West Sussex shard a common-ground. You only have to see the groundswell in interest in the project from local councils, regeneration agencies and community groups to know that there are potentially hundreds of communities ready and willing to take on board the concepts of COR.”
The store is being developed in conjunction with the Mace Blueprint for Success. Says Mace Chief Executive, Mike Bowen, “Like Longley, Rusper Village Stores will offer the local people not only the right range of products and services on their doorstep competitively priced but also the chance to see the profit go back into their community. I am sure it will not be long before residents start using their store for the majority of their shopping and put a penny from every baked bean can or loaf of bread back into the future of themselves and their children rather then the pockets of the multiples or now the likes of Wal-Mart”.
Rusper Village Stores was officially opened on Saturday July 17th by Abigail Russell, aged four, and Hetty Roberts, aged nine. Both girls, from Rusper County Primary School, won a children’s art competition run in the village, to create a poster with a theme, “It’s our store”. Abigail and Hetty were joined by Ken de Bow, who was born (in 1927) and raised in the Rusper Village Stores. At the time, the village store sold everything from horse feed and tackle to flour and clothes. It also housed a chandlers and cobblers and even had its own bakery. The new store will one again bring a bakery back to Rusper.
Article from Sussex Life, September 1999