This is for anybody interested in visiting an open garden on Saturday in Abingdon.
Steve has opened his garden since 2014, raising over £2000 for Maggie’s Cancer Centre in Oxford and Blue Cross in Lewknor.
Steve is a previous Abingdon-on-Thames in Bloom competition winner, and also featured on a BBC2 Gardeners’ World programme last Autumn.
There is a page on the Friends of Abingdon web site for the AbiBinit! Litter Picking Initiative. They will help organise group litter picks, and have one on Saturday 25th August. The meeting point is at Reynolds Way at 10am.
Here in the town centre you are normally never further than thirty paces from the nearest litter bin. But there are still some people who do not find them, particularly when it comes to coffee containers and styrofoam food containers.
Not all litter bins have the word LITTER on them. Some of them have a picture of a person dropping litter into a bin.
Others have no LITTER word or picture. (Extra points for spying one of these.)
Christ’s Hospital is the charity that runs these almshouses and has done for over 450 years. One of Christ’s Hospital’s aims is to provide almshouses to townsfolk who are of good character, over 50 years of age and in need.
The Master and Governors of the charity meet every month in Christ’s Hospital Hall, in the Long Alley Almshouses (build 1446), to discuss the almshouses, and the other three principal aims of the charity.
In recent meetings the maintenance and costings for work on some of the almshouses was discussed. Work is underway this summer…
Brick Alley (brick work)
St John’s(roof)
Twitty’s(paintwork)
The Governors will open Christ’s Hospital Hall during Heritage weekend (8th September) this year. (2018 will be a fairly quiet year Heritage weekend other-wise. More soon.)
The VWHDC (Vale of White Horse District Council) sent out this picture from May 2018 of two mattresses left outside the Sue Ryder charity shop. It was part of a press release warning against leaving donations out of hours at charity shops.
The usual course of action would be to arrange for the mattresses to be taken to a registered waste and recycling centre so they could be disposed of legally.
Initially the person who left the mattresses outside the shop was given a £240 fixed penalty notice with the option to pay in installments. That was not paid, and was followed by a court summons and the total bill with fines and costs went up to £1300.
Cllr Elaine Ware, Cabinet Member for Housing and Environment at VWHDC said: “If you wish to donate items to charity you must check first that they are happy to accept them. If you simply dump goods next to a shop then you are fly-tipping and could face a fine or prosecution.”
Even more costly was a donation to Acacia UK in Abingdon that was set alight. The shop is still boarded up eleven months later.
There is a planning application (dated 1st August 2018) for the shop to ‘Strip out of modern materials following a fire to inspect historic materials and form/agree repair plan.’