The shop will be open seven days a week, with reduced hours on a Sunday. It will stock all essential groceries, plus local produce and delicacies, the priority being a good range at reasonable cost. There will be freshly baked bread, milk, ready prepared meals as well as treats you cannot find in a supermarket. 

Local crafts and artisan products will be available, thus supporting local artists and small businesses, as was illustrated at the Farmers Markets held in 2023 and 2024, in and near the Village Hall. 

We are also planning to offer limited post office services, including pick-up and drop-off parcels, and will arrange that prescriptions be delivered to the shop for collection.

The experience of other village shops (see, for example, two particularly successful shops at Wigginton (wiggintonshop.org.uk) and Bledington (bledingtonshop.com)) shows how this shop can provide a valuable additional amenity to those provided by the Oxford Arms, The Dashwood by Aziz, and the village’s various voluntary organisations.

It will offer employment, training, and volunteering opportunities for people of all ages and it will provide support to those on low incomes or unable/unwilling to travel. In addition, surplus funds, beyond those needed to develop the shop and café, will be distributed within the community to support community projects.

Building design 

• The building will be made of sustainable timber essential for lowering carbon emissions.
• The building system of two structural facings with an insulating foam core will be extremely strong and energy efficient.
• We intend to minimise the use of concrete in the foundations, possibly by using a system of screws.

Energy 

• The intention is to install a pv array on the south-west facing roof, echoing the large array on the roof of the village hall next to the new building and contributing to reducing energy use. 
• We will also install batteries to store unused power and a heating/cooling system that is exceptionally energy-efficient.
• While we expect most customers to arrive on foot, the car park includes two electric vehicle charging points.
• Bike stanchions by the shop will help to encourage cycling.

Biodiversity 

We will include landscaping in the design of the surroundings, to complement planting round the village hall and to increase the biodiversity of the site.

We plan to grow herbs in planters for use in the kitchen and to encourage insects. We will provide insect ‘hotel’ and bird boxes and research the possibility of bat boxes on nearby trees.

Waste 

We will aim to reduce waste as far as possible, by careful planning, offering discounts on products approaching their sell-by date, minimising the use of packaging, especially plastics, providing refill options for basic household products and paper or jute shopping bags.

Most community shops are run as a Community Benefit Society (CBS), an organisation registered with the Financial Conduct Authority with the specific remit that it must benefit the community as a whole. Everyone who has bought shares in the society has become a member and all members have an equal say in the development of the shop, regardless of how many shares they bought. The members elect a management committee to oversee the daily running of the shop.

A community shop is managed and run democratically by the community, with all shareholders having one vote, regardless of the number of shares they have purchased.  Any profits go back into the shop and the community.

There are 459 community shops in the UK, with about 40 of them in Oxfordshire, including in the nearby villages of Weston-on-the Green Tackley and Wootton. To get a flavour of a community shop, have a look at the website of this award-winning shop in nearby Gloucestershire: Bledington Community Shop and Cafe Gloucestershire Cotswolds

• the profits from a commercial business go to the owners of the business; the profits from a community shop go back to the community.
• a commercial business has higher overheads than a community shop.  In particular, it has higher staffing costs than a shop where much of the work is carried out by volunteers under the supervision of a paid supervisor.

Community businesses work. The Plunkett Foundation, based in Woodstock and who have supported our project from the beginning, points out that community businesses in the UK have a long-term survival rate of 94%. By contrast, in the last five years only 39% of SMEs have survived. 

The new shop will operate on a larger scale than the previous commercial shop which closed in 2020 and will offer a sufficiently large space to provide a wider range of goods. The shop will not rely on paid staff but have a paid supervisor supported by volunteers.

While needing to cover its costs and introduce new products, the shop will not need to make a profit: any surplus will be put into the shop or distributed to other community initiatives in the village.

• to respond to the large majority of villagers who expressed their support for a village shop in the questionnaire that was distributed to the whole village in February 2023;
• to provide support for those who cannot or do not want to drive to do their shopping, especially as access by foot to the Co-op is along a busy country road without a pavement;
• to reduce reliance on the use of cars for those who do normally drive to the Co-op or Sainsbury’s; and
• to broaden the range of amenities available in the village, offering an additional place for villagers to meet and interact.

The great advantage of this site for which Cherwell District Council gave us planning permission in November 2023 is that the owners of the estate offered the land rent-free: it is let to the Parish Council for a peppercorn rent on a 99 year lease and has been sublet to the shop on a similar basis. The space is large enough to accommodate a shop and café of appropriate size and is in an idyllic setting, providing an exceptionally attractive stopping place for walkers and cyclists, adjacent to the playing field and the children’s play park as well as offering a peaceful venue for village residents.

Two other possibilities were actively considered. First, there was the option of using part of the Village Hall. If it had been the designed with a shop in mind, it would have been ideal. However, the Hazel Room is not only useful for various smaller meetings, it is also too small for the shop to provide both basic essentials and higher-end farmers’ market-type produce. We also looked at using the sports corridor at a time when it was hardly being used but the prospect of taking this potentially valuable asset out of commission provoked considerable controversy and dismay and we did not pursue the idea.

A second possibility arose after the sudden closure of Flora’s restaurant at the Dashwood Arms in the summer of 2024. We were presented with the attractive option of renting an existing space of historical significance in the heart of the village rather than erecting a new building. In January 2025 discussions with the owners of the Dashwood on this possibility began. In March 2025 the terms of the lease were agreed but at the last minute, the owners of the Dashwood told us they had found an alternative tenant ready to take the whole building,

After considerable discussion, we decided to proceed with our initial proposal to build next to the Village Hall and to launch the share offer in June 2025, in the knowledge that if the money can be raised, the shop will have an excellent chance of thriving, not least because it will not have the overheads it would have faced at the Dashwood, notably a significant level of rent, much higher staffing, power, insurance and maintenance costs and a sizeable deposit.

The addition of a café to the shop creates an important social hub in the village:

• it offers an opportunity for shoppers, especially the elderly, to sit down and chat with friends and neighbours,
• provides a meeting place to welcome newcomers and visitors to the village
• will make an important contribution towards the financial viability of the project.

Careful preparation of a project on this scale necessarily takes time and effort, including: 

• establishing the level of support in the village for a community run shop by setting up a village-wide survey and processing the responses; 
• improving our understanding of the working of community shops, by visiting several and discussing their operation with their managers; 
• obtaining detailed advice on our plans from the Plunkett Foundation in Woodstock, which supports community businesses, to ensure they are a viable and realistic; 
• illustrating the potential of the shop by organising three farmers markets; 
• obtaining planning permission from Cherwell District Council and then discussing with Kirtlington Parish Council the terms of a sub-lease for the proposed initial site next to the Village Hall; 
• preparing for registration as a Community Benefit Society, developing a robust business plan, producing a website and planning the public launch of a share prospectus, inviting villagers to support the creation of the shop;  
• investigating potential sources of grant finance to complement the support provided by shareholders and donors; and 
• examining other options for the siting of the shop and café, notably at the Dashwood Arms. 

To provide for the unlikely eventuality of the shop failing, we have agreed with Kirtlington Parish Council that a deposit of £10,000 to cover the removal of the building and the restoration of the site be placed in an escrow account once building starts. This deposit (with interest) will be returned to the shop after five years. It should be noted that the material used for the shop would itself be resaleable.