Country Living feature on St Neot

Life in Britain's best village

(Words by Lucy Pinney / Photographs by Cristian Barnett - www.countryliving.co.uk)

From welcoming incomers and using their talents, to a community garden and care for young and elderly residents, St Neot in Cornwall is officially the ideal community.

There’s a committee meeting underway in the corner of the St Neot Social Club bar, as there often is. Any number of items might be under discussion, from plans for a performance on the village green to the need to redecorate the loos in the church, but one thing is certain: when the people of St Neot make a decision to do something, they don’t do it by halves.

This Cornish community of around 450 people on the edge of Bodmin Moor was voted Calor Village of the Year in 2004 and, more recently, winner of its Best of the Best award to celebrate ten years of the competition. St Neot is officially Britain’s best village, and you don’t have to spend very long here to understand why. For instance, this Friday evening the new Community Centre is filled with farmers celebrating the end of the week. Next door, in the village hall, a ballet class has finished, and a crowd of little girls in frothy pink dresses has tripped away. Tomorrow morning, the hall will become a market, full of fresh fruit, vegetables and flowers.

But now, as twilight falls, the car park heaves with teenagers, gossiping and joshing each other as they wait for their Youth Room to open. St Neot is so famous, locally, for all the activities it lays on for youngsters that they pour in from the surrounding areas. Climb the steep stairs at the back of the Community Centre, to where the youth leader, Derek Fairhall (pictured, left), is opening up his little café, and what’s inside is even more surprising. The entertainment he provides is both simple and old-fashioned. There are snacks, music and plenty of games on offer, and he is a sympathetic listener – but a firm disciplinarian.

Older people in the village are looked after with equal sensitivity. Like every rural community, St Neot has an efficient grapevine, and anyone in trouble is swiftly helped out. When a young couple’s bungalow burned down before Christmas, there was an immediate whip-round, while a woman suffering from cancer returned from hospital to find her kitchen redecorated. Local farmer Joe Rowe, a regular at the village pub, sums up the delicacy of this response when he says: “I’ve just recently split up with my wife, and everybody in St Neot has been supportive – to both of us.”

Joe goes on to explain that the village is also unusually selfless in the way it supports community projects: “Everyone here makes time to help everybody else.” But to become Britain’s best village, St Neot had to show that is was more than just a caring community. This village has another great strength: it is good at recognising and using new talent.

When Derek Fairhall arrived in the area more than 20 years ago he let slip that he’d done voluntary work in a Salvation Army youth club, and was immediately coaxed into doing something similar in the village. The same happened to Kath Page, the dancer who runs ballet classes, and to countless others – musicians, artists, builders, gardeners, cooks – because St Neot has never resented incomers. Its keenness to utilise fresh potential can be comical at times: when Sue and Brian Williams bought a cottage opposite the pub 16 years ago, a severe-looking gentleman in black arrived on their doorstep with a tape measure, saying he’d been sent by the local undertaker, John Doran. “I thought he was measuring me for my coffin,” Brian jokes. “But it turned out that John had noticed I was a useful size to help him carry coffins and drive hearses and the man on the doorstep was a funeral outfitter ready to suit and boot me.”

Sue points out another important village asset: the proactive parish council. “Everyone wants the village to remain unspoiled. But, of course, there are difficult people. One farmer wouldn’t keep his ponies in and they trampled gardens and ate the dahlias. When talking to him didn’t work, the parish council put up cattle grids. We have such good people to call on: competition organiser Martin Eddy fills in forms and finds grants, and Bevil Bunt gets everything done.”

Bevil (pictured, left) is a true St Neoter, from one of the many farming families at the heart of the community. Semi-retired and in his seventies, he is one of the reasons that no project undertaken by the villagers – however ambitious – ever fails. An example is the Doorstep Green, a donated piece of land that has been landscaped into a formal garden and an amphitheatre, and connected by a wooden bridge to playing fields and the school, so that the whole centre of the village has become a huge, tranquil space, safe to play in and crossed by the gently rippling River Loveny. There’s even a ‘community fork’ leaning against a tree, should a passer-by feel the urge to do a bit of weeding. The Green was created by teams of villagers working together with local contractor Colin Alford over ten weekends – a total of more than 2,000 volunteer hours – and at the centre of all that activity was Bevil, working harder and faster than everyone else and handing out Cornish pasties.

The most astonishing example of St Neot’s enterprise and energy is the cricket pavilion. It is a marvel of neat weather-boarding, with hanging baskets filled with scarlet flowers and a long verandah. It is therefore hard to believe it started out as an old Portakabin, going spare in the neighbouring village of Doublebois. It was too heavy to transport whole, so the enterprising villagers sawed it into six sections, ferried it over on tractors and trailers, and painstakingly reassembled it. And then they raised the funds to repair and equip it.

But then, St Neot has always been brilliant at raising money, especially during St Neot Weeks. These happen every few years, and while they are in progress homemade food is served continuously in the village hall, there are craft stalls and duck races, a barn dance, donkey Derby and jazz café, gardens are thrown open, the streets are lined with flowers, and the church gets an enormous floral carpet. This last is an innovation of another pillar of the community: Bridget Kent (pictured, right). Her husband Peter plans the carpet design, and then the pews are moved aside, a silage sheet is laid down, Oasis is put on it, and roses, carnations, alstroemerias, gerberas, and thousands of different-coloured chrysanthemums are pushed into place by a huge team of children and villagers. The end result is so stunning that visitors from across the South West queue and pay to see it. One St Neot Week collected more than £40,000 in six days.

Despite all these astounding achievements and skills, the village still had to learn winning strategies. Martin Eddy explains: “Our first entry for the Calor competition was simply amateurish. The second time we entered we won three national categories, but still failed overall. I asked the judges why. They said we were weak at business – and our environmental side should have been stronger.” This learning by entering is one of the main reasons the Calor Village of the Year competition has been such a success.

The best villages to live in,” Martin says, “are the well-rounded ones that involve as many people as possible. Now I’m a judge myself I can see where other villages go wrong. Often there are challenges coming up in the future that they haven’t thought about – like there’ll be transport for older people, but no one will have realised it isn’t sustainable long-term because it all depends on one driver. And all villages have to keep improving: nowadays ours gets frustrated if we’re not planning enough new projects.” One of St Neot’s other problems is that no one wants to move. As Derek Fairhall says, “I stumbled on this place by accident. But it would take dynamite to get me out now!”

• Find out more about the Calor Village of the Year for England competition