More snowdrops

Can you have too many pictures of the snowdrops coming through in St Nicolas’ churchyard?  Probably.  But seeing the sun on them yesterday morning meant I couldn’t resist.

The names of Mary and Richard Garness stands out particularly clearly on the gravestone right of centre.  He died in 1824. 

Noticing this has sent me back to two notes I made a short while ago from the eighteenth century Sutton Estates papers about Great Coates flood protection:

31st October 1788 (when Richard Garness would have been 26)  – “Paid Matthew Garness for white cliff stone 540 tons & repairing at the Humber Bank - £88 10/4”.

 7th May 1793 – an inspection revealed the bank “… appeared to be in tolerable repair… there was one place (where the bottom of an old boat was crammed in to repel the tide) that seemed to me to require… reparation”.

Parkland

The maintenance of the churchyard at St Michael's, Little Coates is the responsibility of North East Lincolnshire Council (local authorities are responsible for all churchyards which have been legally 'closed') so the members oft he congregation here have one less thing about which to worry.  A short while ago it did a lot of clearance work particularly on the southern boundary where trees were beginning to interfere with the neighbour's roof.

Meanwhile, I was thinking again with someone yesterday about the names given to the new housing areas developed within the parish since The Willows was begun in the 1960s.  Working clockwise round the map, there are half a dozen 'new' double barrelled names: Aylesby Park, Wybers Wood, Church Meadows, Freshney Green, Cambridge Park and Laceby Acres.  In each and every case the first part indicates the immediate or more distant neighbour: Aylesby village, Wybers Wood itself, St Michael's Church, the River Freshney, Cambridge Road and Laceby village.  But in each and every case the second part probably gives away where the urban developer thought the new residents would actually have preferred to live: in open acres, green, meadows, park (twice!) and wood.

Development possibilities

And here is another corner of potential building development in the parish.  There have been repeated planning applications over the years relating to the farmyard site opposite St George's, Bradley, turned down each time.  Meanwhile, the farm buildings there have simply been allowed to deteriorate.  Recent high winds have just brought down the roof of one of the barns pictured here.

Speaking at the General Synod earlier this week, the Archbishop of Canterbury said:

We all know that perfect love casts out fear. We know it although we don’t often apply it.  We mostly know that perfect fear casts out love. In any institution or organisation, the moment that suspicion reigns and the assumption that everything is zero sum becomes dominant (that is to say that some else’s gain must be my loss, we can’t both flourish) that institution will be increasingly dominated by fear...

I recently commented that where a growing church is there is usually a good incumbent. A number of people took that to mean as well that where a church is not growing it must be because there’s a bad vicar. But I didn’t say that, and neither did I mean it. I have to confess that the moment I said it I knew I had expressed myself badly, and do apologise to those hurt by the comment. But, the underlying point remains, fear leads to the assumption of denigration.  

I'm glad he clarified this, and am interested that he sees the instinctive negative reaction to his original comment, which I shared, as being symptomatic of an underlying fear.

As it happens, the congregation at St Michael's, Little Coates appears to be just a little bigger than it was when I went away.  I don't know what the Archbishop would make of that!  Perhaps the real recipe for growth is for me to get out of the way.  

Thistle Field

From time to time, I've been tracking the development of the Little Coates fields into modern urban Grimsby (including this post) so the sale of the large site on which the buildings of the long closed Western School sits is worthy of note - an estate of 400 or more houses will appear on what was in part the Thistle Field

More than snowdrops

This iris is in our front garden today.

A recent death announcement in our local paper recorded what at first sight read '.. after a long fight with her husband...', but reading on it became clear that it was simply the case that a comma had been left out (it was put in the following day) to separate out the thought '... with her husband at her side'.

Snowdrops

Both the churchyard at St Nicolas', Great Coates and this Blog are beginning to wake up after a winter sleep.

St Nicolas' struggles to balance its budget with routine expenditure demands (within an annual turnover of about £15000 and with balances reduced to £12000), but nevertheless dug deep to spend £5000 on emergency tree work not that long ago.  Meanwhile, external funding bodies are under increasing pressure and, quite correctly, focus only on significant demands.  So who finances work in a churchyard like this, other than the most basic maintenance the church and a few volunteers continue to do?

We developed plans to enhance people's enjoyment of the mini nature reserve which is the churchyard - to take out one unimportant tree so as to open up the view from the road (originally a suggestion from the Village Council), to print a simple guide, to re-erect two notable gravestones (not our legal responsibility at all, but they would both be referred to in the guide), to place some discreet wooden information signs, to resurface paths which are breaking up (without which disabled access is not possible) and to do further tree work (recommended by those who did the emergency work).

This would all cost some £8000.  The rub is that this is way outside the church's own budget, but the first two sets of funders we have approached quite understandably say the bid 'contains too much routine maintenance work'.  It feels a bit like a cleft stick.  A local community fund (able to make grants of up to £2500) does offer to look at the more immediately developmental parts of the project, and we are gratefully about to follow this up, but it seems a bit tough on the regular attenders to think they are the ones then left to dig deeper to fund work on the paths and trees in the churchyard in which their church happens to be set.

A Yarborough Network

Here is how I am trying to kick-start another of the things we have identified as working priorities for the first half of 2014:

“The Yarborough Network 2014”

-         a private initiative to try to

build community communication and capacity

There is a whole range of voluntary community commitment in the Yarborough Ward.  Examples include individual care of neighbours, the Littlecoates Community Centre, groups using St Michael’s Church building, Neighbourhood Watches, and uniformed organisations for young people.  There will be many others as well.

But there is nothing like the range of shared awareness and planning which exists in the neighbouring Wards.  For example, the Freshney Ward has things like the Bishop King Centre, an active Community Church, a monthly ‘Freshney Forward’ coordinating meeting, Residents’ Associations serving two different parts of the Ward, and a Village Council for one part of the Ward. 

This may be why, when the opportunity to create a Community First plan and funding group arose in both Wards, the Freshney one has turned out to be widely representative and able to provoke and deal with a range of projects while the Yarborough one has even most recently found it difficult to get members to respond e-mail consultations.

So a couple of residents of the Ward want to commit themselves through 2014 to doing some things which might change the environment.  We want to discover the whole range of what is going on and to get those involved to share this widely.  We want to see whether others can be drawn into active engagement.

One of us is Sylvia Leary who lives on Laceby Acres and happens to work for the Care Plus Group; she has recently taken part in a ‘Releasing Community Capacity’ training course and may have a route to some local funding as a result.  The other is Peter Mullins who lives on Littlecoates Road and happens to be the Rector of the Church of England parish which covers most of the Ward; he has been involved in a number of community projects in the Ward over the last fifteen years.

They would welcome anyone who lives in the Ward and who would like to work with them as a sort of ‘ginger group’ for this one year.  They do not want to create a new structure or committee, nor do they want to spend their time doing things which are unproductive or which fight any existing structures, but they hope a few bits of publicity, the odd bit of provocation and support, and a well planned gathering or two might be the way to make a difference.

They are going to renew a request to the Community First panel for the funding for a good quality one off brochure to be distributed across the whole Ward (working with CPO Media which used to produce the ‘Toothill and Roundabout’ community publication).  They are going to renew a request to Voluntary Action in North East Lincolnshire to have access help develop the website at yarborough.inandaround.org.uk.  They hope that simply contacting and engaging as many individuals and groups as possible in these two projects will help local people identify together which bits of work might then make a difference.

It is clear that things like continued cuts and benefit changes mean that the time for revealing and building a stronger local community infrastructure is crucial.  A piece of work done around the former Area Action Group (then part of North East Lincolnshire’s Neighbourhood Development strategy) revealed that grass-roots groups are better at identifying immediately visible issues (the phrase ‘crime and grime’ was used, but problems with traffic would be another obvious example) than the hidden issues which are particularly pressing in their area (examples elsewhere have been abuse, debt, isolated elderly and teenage pregnancy), so one piece of work would also be finding out what is already known about these and sharing this with existing and potential community groups.