For such a small tightly nested network of villages the scale and range of voluntary activity recorded in the locality is extraordinary.
Every week people here feed the five thousand at the Ethel Wood Centre, parish councilors and their colleagues organise the minibus to support senior citizens, the Pevensey Volunteers plants with pride to cheer the shop fronts, volunteer drivers based at the Information Centre ferry people to hospital appointments.
Something like 80 organisations put on events from flower arranging demonstrations, to history talks to invited speakers for the WI. There are free Movies in the Bay, celebrations and get togethers from knits and natters in tea rooms to arts and crafts groups across three villages to creative writing groups to gardening, allotment societies and healthy walks and church based community events and celebrations, as they practice ringing the bells in ways passed down through the centuries.
The Parish Pump, the magazine that has been providing a voice for local community organisations in the area since 1967 (published three times a year and complied and distributed by unpaid volunteers, editor, Nick Monroe), recorded in the mid nineteen eighties that there may be as many as 200 voluntary organisations in the locality.
It is no different in 2017 as new organisations emerge particularly in the areas of green growth and history, topics such as creative writing, to societies beginning to reconnect to the rich arts and crafts movement here that has always resonated through the history of the community, since we first appeared on that brilliant piece of product placement, the international world heritage treasure that is the Bayeux Tapestry, in 1080.
One of the most remarkable recent events was Your Bard – an informal audience with Will Shakespeare, Shakespeare in the Pub at the Royal Oak and Castle Inn with nationally renowned actor, Nicolas Collett as he put on the show, in the round, of the public house, free of charge.
The ad hoc group planning for the possibility of a volunteer based annual Pevensey Arts, and Literature Festival, to be based facing Pevensey castle, is interesting.
Then group plans to link, amongst other authors and artists, C.S. Lewis with his Narnia Chronicles, with his Pevensie connection. Kipling, George Gissing, Christina Rossetti who picnicked as child in the grounds of Pevensey castle and Val Prinseps, together with Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and fans of the Goons, to be based in Pevensey at the Royal Oak and Castle Inn, supported by two of the key organisres that put on the Dickens evening in the village in December 2015. Perhaps we will see them setting out their stall on Information Day 2018.
So many people in Pevensey and Pevensey Bay are connected to the voluntary movement here that some of their activities, campaigns and celebrations with events up and down the parish pass as commonplace weekly events., The fact that the voluntary activity here is so much part of the social fabric and goes on unnoticed in Pevensey and Pevensey Bay is a tribute to all the work.
The Big Society was alive and well here long before before Philip Blond coined the phrase for David Cameron, remember him?
Across the parish, turn up, tune in, the bells ring out for Information Day.
The Information Day is sponsored and supported by Pevensey Parish Council and quite possibly one of the best organised annual events in the parish.
Information Day 2017
St. Wilfrid’s Hall and Pevensey Bay Baptist Church Hall
Saturday 22 April, 2017
10:00am—1:00pm
40 local voluntary organisations show their wares, an opportunity to get involved, make connections and find out more about the fabulous range of activities that take place in the parish
