Hambledon Village Shop successfully applied for a grant of £10,000 to help up-grade its  freezers and chillers.   These have now been installed.  The main purchase is new chiller cabinets for the fruit and veg –to keep it fresh, to enable the range to be extended, to reduce wastage and to save on air conditioning costs.  An additional freezer has been bought for ready meals.   Storeroom freezers have been replaced, to extend capacity and reduce running costs. 

As a community, not-for-profit venture, Hambledon Village Shop generates a reasonable trading surplus and sensible reserves;  but these do not realise sufficient income to invest in capital projects. Finance for these has to be sought from grant-making agencies and fund-raising activities within the village.  

The benefactor this time is the Surrey Hills Leader Programme, which is part of the new Rural Development Programme for England.  Half the funds are being provided by the UK government (DEFRA) and the other half by the European Union. 

The first major project was the restoration of the barn (the current store room).  A successful application to an earlier DEFRA-run RuralDevelopment Programme in 2005 resulted in a grant of nearly £29,000,equivalent to 80 per cent of the restoration costs.  Two years later the shop premises underwent a major up-grade after a range of applications realised grants of over £52,000:  this time it was thePost Office and Waverley who were the major contributors. 
However, neither project could have gone ahead if the grants had not been topped up by the proceeds from village events and by numerous –and often extremely generous - individual donations.