| Sheena
Broadhead Chronicle correspondent Winsley Award A Wiltshire village store has beaten off strong competition to win an award in the final stage of a Neighbourhood Shop of the Year contest. Alan and Sarah Appleby of Winsley Post Office Stores, near Bradford on Avon, received the silver award in the West Country and South Wales category of the competition organised by Robert Wiseman Dairies. The couple, already among the area finalists, flew to Scotland for the awards ceremony in St Andrews, where the winners were announced. A panel of judges visited the shop last month and secretly asked customers their opinion of the store. Mystery shoppers also checked out the premises to see what kind of service was being offered. Mr and Mrs Appleby ran the Winsley store for ten years before leaving in 1999. Previously the village had a local shop and news agency, with a separate post office which closed in 1990. The Applebys bought the news agency in 1997 because that was also due to close, incorporating it as part of the general stores. Mr Appleby said: "We left the Winsley shop two years ago but came back in February this year when we found out it was threatened with closure. "We put a considerable amount of our own money into the project to build it up again. We decided we just couldn't let the post office close when so many other villages have no facilities at all. "As well as running the post office and store, we also sell our own home-baked bread and offer a dry cleaning service." "We had an absolutely superb evening at the awards ceremony. We stayed in a luxury five-star hotel in St Andrews, where we were treated to a wonderful meal and heralded in to the ceremony by a traditional Scottish pipe band to receive our prize of a Glencairn crystal decanter and glasses", he added. "We are very proud to be the winners of our category. Although the competition is an annual event, this is the first time that shops in the west of England have been included, as the dairy company did not service this part of the country until this year. The gold award in the West Country category went to Heritage Fine Foods of Glastonbury. |