Woodgreen Community Shop has sold a range of merchandise since it opened in 2011: the usual things such as tea towels, shopping bags, postcards, place mats, pens, etc., but also its own calendars, a community recipe book, and a book of local walking routes.
The Shop produced its own calendar each year from 2014 to 2022. In the early years, this raised money for the shop and, one year, it was only the sales of the calendar and recipe book that kept the shop from making a significant loss! This website, ‘Woodgreen Stories’, is an extension of the historical theme used in the 2019 calendar. The 2017 calendar featured 12 walking routes and these were also published separately as one-page guides and also in a compilation booklet. The walking routes live on in their own Woodgreen Walks website.
Unfortunately, increasing printing costs eventually made this kind of venture uneconomical.
The Calendars
The Recipe Book
Woodgreen Shop’s Recipe book, “Locals’ Food”, was printed in 2014 and there was a second edition reprint in 2019. The foreword by Sue Allpress is a good account of the enterprise:
This recipe book is a celebration of all that is good about Woodgreen and its community shop. It is above all a tribute to all the shareholders, grant providers, builders, architects, management team (past and present) and, most
important of all, the staff and customers, without whom the rescue of the old shop and the building of the new shop, and consequently the production of this recipe book, would not have been possible.
With some of the grant money earmarked for Local Food Projects, Julie Bottone and I volunteered to collect recipes from village residents and local food suppliers – all the better if they came with some family history or background. Just about all of the ingredients can be found in the shop and, in cooking these delicious recipes, you will be supporting both the shop and its many excellent local suppliers. An excellent cause if ever there was one!
Having no previous experience of such a venture, it soon became clear that we needed someone to coordinate matters, and David Mussell proved to be the man for this. Two other key members of the team were also quickly recruited: Steve Morris who had the task of actually producing the book layout, and Barry Bullough, our photographer.
Steve is a technical author and illustrator whose considerable computer skills and authorship have put together the tangible end product you see here. Barry is a food photographer, now retired but who has worked with Delia Smith among others, and whose fabulous photography you have almost certainly seen in all sorts of cookery books and magazines.
With David and Steve organising and coordinating the process, Julie and I first cooked a batch of recipes, which were delivered to Barry’s studio. We soon learned that it was not enough to cook tasty food: it had to look perfect on the plate. The plaintive cry of “What am I meant to do with that?” was heard when an unpromising looking dish was placed before Barry. However, with consummate skill and much patience he was always able to produce the perfect picture. Literally hundreds of photos were taken and many hours spent poring over them to select the best picture for each recipe. Steve compiled the photographs and various ingredients into this book: another labour of love involving many drafts and hours slaving over a hot computer. Julie, David and I chased up all the story lines, personal biographies, and family snaps, helped at this point by Bill Shepley who took some of the photos of contributors, as the book gradually emerged in final shape.
The upside of all this is that we can vouch for all the recipes as being worthy of our book and its contributors, since we have not only cooked them but have tasted them too. It has been quite a project for our team but we have all had a lot of fun, not least the tasting sessions afterwards. Finally, our sincere thanks go out to all our contributors and everyone who has had a hand in helping us. it all took longer than we expected but we very much hope that you think it was worth the wait.
Woodgreen Walks
Woodgreen Walks are 12 short, circular routes in the small but beautiful corner of the New Forest around Woodgreen. The walks originally featured in Woodgreen Community Shop’s 2019 calendar and are now supported by their own website: http://walks.woodgreenshop.org.
On the website, each route description has a link to a Google Maps version allowing you to navigate with your phone. All the routes can be combined or mixed and matched to make longer walks.