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 Wyverstone Community Cafe is a regular fortnightly event held at our village hall in Wyverstone, Suffolk.  We pride ourselves in serving excellent coffee and home-baked cakes, as well as our popular bacon and egg baps.  We also have local produce on sale in a mini farmers’ market – currently organic vegetables and eggs, fruit in season, home-made cakes, chutneys and jams, and also now locally-raised pork, sausages and bacon.

What's It All About?

The community cafe was born in April 2009.  Its aims are two-fold:  To support and encourage the local food economy by providing a place where small-scale food producers can sell their produce direct to local people.  And secondly to provide a regular social event where people can meet, chat and enjoy good quality refreshments in a relaxed atmosphere.

Its been interesting that, since its inception, the cafe idea has sparked off other ideas that link with it:  There’s now a regular village ramble which ends up at the cafe for a well-earned drink.  Someone also started the community book exchange – a place to leave your excess books and collect new ones for a small donation.  And on September 19th, visitors can buy a map of where yard sales are being held around the village. Its great to see our little bit of creative thinking providing opportunities for other links like these.

The thinking that inspired our little venture draws on the ideas of the Transition movement – a grassroots response to the problems of climate change and resource depletion.  You can read more about it in “The Transition Handbook” by Rob Hopkins, or on the movement’s main website:  www.transitionculture.org What it comes down to is this:  We are headed for deeply troubled times as the effects of climate change begin to be felt, together with the realisation that we are wholly dependent on a finite energy source (oil) that is running out far faster than most people realise.  In the absence of a coherent response from our elected leaders, a bottom-up movement is emerging, promoting lots of wonderful creative ideas for coping with the future, all bound up within a vision that a gentler, less consuming lifestyle would be a lot better for us all, as well as the planet.  I probably haven’t summed it up too well, but we feel that the community cafe fits well within this emerging movement.

To find out more and to see what is happening at the next Cafe on Saturday 3rd October visit www.wyverstonecafe.co.uk