BUILDING COMMUNITY LIFE IN NORTHUMBERLAND
– 2005
Since 1997 Calor have sponsored the Calor Village of the Year® competition. Last year the competition had a new format within which the competition judges communities on a total of six aspects of rural village life, one of which was Building Community Life. The other five categories covered Business, Young People, Older People, the Environment and Information Communication Technology (ICT).
Since not all communities wished to enter the 6 categories there was an opportunity to enter the Building Community Life section of the competition without entering the other 5 aspects. This was to encourage more entries. The winning community within Northumberland was Wingates in the Alnwick district of Northumberland who then prepared an entry for all 6 sections of the competition to progress to the regional and national stages.
On Tuesday 6 December 2005 Linda Wilson, Sue Rouitt and Kirsty Bell from Wingates attended an awards ceremony in London for the Calor Village of the Year® competition, where the guest of honour was Alan Titchmarsh. Although they knew that they had won the Building Community Life competition in Northumberland it came as a great surprise to them when it was announced that Wingates had won the Business category, and £500 prize money, in the North England region of the competition, competing against villages from Cheshire, Cumbria, Humber & Wolds, Lancashire, North Lincolnshire, Redcar & Cleveland, Tees Valley and Yorkshire.
In 2006 the Calor Village of the Year again adopted the previous year's format. All villages* in the 6 local authority districts of Northumberland were invited to participate in the Building Community Life section.
This year entry to the competition was made easier as communities were asked to fill in a multiple choice questionnaire. Another slight change in 2006 is that, following recent staff reductions, CAN do not have sufficent resources available to organise the Northumberland competition so we asked Durham Rural Community Council, one of our partner RCCs, to organise the competition on our behalf.
Information and entry forms wentout to villages across the county to encourage them to enter the newly established Calor Building Community Life competition. Entrants were asked to return their completed questionnaires to Durham RCC by the closing date.
