It was pouring with rain when I got out of the train from Maidstone, at Hollingbourne station. With difficulty, I climbed up the steps and over the bridge, getting wetter with every minute. It was a relief at the other side to see that the station waiting room was open.
Looking for the waiting room
Many waiting rooms in small stations in the Southeast have been abandoned and locked up. As explained in an earlier article, the only way to bring these rooms back into operation would be to open a business in them. Southeastern Railway no longer budgets for all-day staff costs for the many small stations on its routes.
Still dripping from the rain, I entered the room to find it has been beautifully laid out as a café. There were several round tables, one occupied by three socialising customers, and the other by Chris Hammond who was eating a flapjack while waiting for me there, as we were due to drive out to a local farm to interview David Catt.
Scrumptious cakes
At the counter, there was a scrumptious display of home-made cakes. I talked with the café manager about how she had managed to get such a café going. She explained that Hollingbourne is a small village. She and others felt that a café for socialising would be an asset. The parish council gave her a start-up grant. The café was open in January this year. She is the full-time manager, and gains enough income from it to pay for her work. She does all the cleaning too, including the excellent accessible toilet. Volunteers from the village come and help in a roster. One of them was helping as we spoke.
I asked about the bakery goods, obviously so much tastier and more nutritious than the sugary packets in shiny paper one can buy at bigger stations. She said that people from the village contribute to the bakery. I did not want to embarrass her by asking about health and safety regulations which nowadays seem to discourage the marketing of homemade bakery, which results in shoppers addicted to the sugary packaged goods from supermarkets.
I have some ancestral connection to baking. A three-times great grandmother, fostered on a Cheshire farm, a childhood shadowed by a run-away Dad, made good early in her own marriage by baking and selling gingerbread. We used to refer to her as the “gingerbread granny”. She did so well marketing her biscuits that she convinced her carpenter husband to invest in opening a shop for groceries as well as bakery. That shop eventually became a prime High Street attraction, “Purveyors of fine provisions”, in Knutsford for 100 years, and supported three generations of my ancestors.
Fresh versus factory-made products
Nowadays, food hygiene rules allow church and community groups to serve homemade food at occasional functions, but if there is ‘continuity’ in the ‘food undertaking’, then the manager must seek to register with the food safety officer of the local council. There is plentiful advice on hygiene, food safety, allergens etc. So, it is not impossible to open a food outlet which sells fresh-made rather than factory-made products. It is noticeable, however, how much factory-made biscuits and cakes are the norm in so many public places and events in the UK. From what we now know about ultra-processed food, it is hardly progress to push local fresh-made food out of public places. Like home-made cakes at station waiting rooms.
Volunteers keep villages going
At Hollingbourne, the operation was enabled by the parish council start-up grant, and by the willing volunteers. I looked up the social data about the village. It is within the North Downs ward of Maidstone, and has about 900 ‘souls’. 57.92% work full-time and 29.08% part time, unemployed 2.36%. There is a comment that part-time work may indicate ‘under employment’. This sort of statistic makes me mutter – presuppositions of male bean-counters!! Another way of looking at the statistics would be how many are unpaid care-givers, either of children or of the elderly. And, how many of those “under-employed’ people are in fact the volunteers who keep the village going, whether at the church, on the sports-field, or with hime-made cakes at the station café.
Those of us who live in Kent or Surrey villages know that it is the volunteers who keep things going. The new Hollingbourne station café is a miraculous example of this. May many other communities with small stations see this as an example to follow!
