Charles Lawley

How coronavirus has made the Big Society a reality in the Peak District

These are dark times that are affecting all of us, but I see a glimmer of hope for communities like mine in the Peak District in Derbyshire. Our group’s community-led response, in the face of coronavirus has given me faith that we, and areas like ours, will come out of this with a renewed sense of community and local civil society will be stronger than ever.

I live in Chapel-en-le-Frith in the High Peak. The area has recently transitioned from a large village into a small town, as new developments have steadily increased our numbers over the past few decades. Prior to this crisis, people’s view on the sense of community generally fell into one of two categories. It was either: ‘I’ve lived here for years and it’s not like it was’ or ‘I’m quite new to the area and I don’t really know many people.’ However, in the face of all this grimness, I feel that this is changing.

We are a town of about 8,000 adults, however over 1,100 of us have joined our COVID-19 Mutual Aid Group and it has restored a sense of neighbourliness that many of us believed to have been lost forever, under the bricks and mortar of new housing estates. The group is on Facebook and the aim is simple, you post on there if you need help and you post on there if you can offer help. It is a platform for the community to help out each other and, unlike other more centralised responses, it is getting individual problems solved in minutes and seconds, not days and weeks and no one is falling through the cracks.

In the first week of the crisis, a single mother of a severely disabled child asked me to post on her behalf – she needed hand sanitiser to administer medicine to her child but, due to panic buying, she had run out and, because of their strict isolation, couldn’t go to the shops and hunt some out.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in