On a Saturday in late June, the village of Heckington in Lincolnshire held its annual fete on the playing field behind the church. There were stalls selling jam and second-hand books, a raffle with prizes donated by local businesses, a dog show judged with great seriousness by a retired vet, and a tea tent that ran out of scones by two o'clock. About four hundred people came. For a village of 3,500, that is a respectable turnout.
What the programme did not mention was that the proceeds — around £3,200 — would go towards maintaining the village hall, which the parish council can no longer afford to subsidise at the level it once did. The hall is used six days a week: by a toddler group, a lunch club for older residents, a craft circle, a fitness class and a weekly surgery run by the local GP practice. Without the fete money, the hall committee would need to raise its hire charges significantly, pricing out some of the groups that depend on it.
The Quiet Work of Volunteers
This pattern — community fundraising quietly filling gaps left by reduced public funding — is replicated across rural England. The organisations doing this work rarely seek attention. They are run by volunteers who regard what they do as simply getting on with things, not as a political statement about the state of public services.
But the cumulative effect is significant. A survey published earlier this year by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations estimated that voluntary and community organisations in rural England contribute the equivalent of £2.4 billion in unpaid labour annually. Much of this work involves providing services that were once funded by local authorities or the NHS.
The Limits of Voluntarism
There are limits to what volunteers can sustain. The people who run these organisations are, for the most part, older — retired teachers, former nurses, people who have the time and the organisational skills that come from a working life. Recruiting younger volunteers is a persistent challenge, particularly in villages where younger residents commute long distances and have less time for community commitments.
There is also the question of what happens when the volunteers are no longer there. Several village halls in Lincolnshire have closed in recent years not because of lack of funding but because the committees that ran them could not find successors. The building remains; the community infrastructure it housed does not.
"We're not a substitute for proper services. We're a supplement. But lately it feels like we're being asked to do a lot more supplementing." — Chair of a village hall committee, Lincolnshire
A Summer of Fetes
For now, the summer fete season continues. In Dorset, a coastal village raised £5,000 for its defibrillator fund. In Shropshire, a church fete doubled as a fundraiser for the local food bank. In Norfolk, a village show that has run for 140 years attracted its largest crowd since before the pandemic.
The bunting is cheerful, the scones are reliably good, and the dog show is always taken more seriously than it probably should be. But behind the bunting, a great deal of quiet, unglamorous work is holding together the social infrastructure of rural England — work that deserves more acknowledgement than it typically receives.