Community First volunteer and Pennington Community Action Group committee member gives presentation to Lymington and Pennington Town Council on community resources

A COMMUNITY worker has called for a rebalance of community facilities in her home village.

Sarah Fawkes, who works for the charity Community First, gave a presentation to Lymington and Pennington Town Council about the lack of community resources in Pennington compared with Lymington.

She highlighted the disparities by pointing out Lymington has four dentists’ and three doctors’ surgeries while Pennington has none.

She noted there are “poor” bus services from Pennington to Lymington New Forest Hospital at Ampress Park, and no railway station. She also showed a map to councillors showing the abundance of pubs and toilet blocks in Lymington compared to Pennington.

In her presentation, she stated: “To me this unfair, skewed, disproportionate distribution looks like it’s supporting tourism, visitors and businesses, but not the people who pay their council taxes in the two areas.”

Afterwards she told the A&T: “I wanted to raise awareness of how it is in Pennington when looking ahead at future resource allocations.

“People [from Pennington] like going to Lymington but some people can’t travel that distance because of their mobility.”

She said that as a charity worker, Pennington Community Action Group (PCAG) committee member and Pennington resident, she is supporting PCAG’s recent request for more benches from the town council, and would like to see a dedicated community area like a park established.

She added: “Ideally what we’re looking for is a community centre or youth centre, or somewhere that the NHS could hire and run blood checks, for example.

“I’m a Pennington resident so this is a lot of my personal view. I help communities to be communities, but it feels really quite hard for Pennington residents to get together due to a lack of public facilities.”

Sarah said PCAG has recently adopted a disused telephone box at the corner of Ramley Road and Hazel Road and wants ideas from local school children on what to do with it.

She hopes adopting the phone box will be the first of several improvements to community resources in Pennington.

“The action group has adopted the phone box, so we have got a community space now, although it’s only 80cms square,” she told the A&T.

“We’ve got a competition going with the local schools asking what they would like to do with it.

“It’s been suggested it could be a kindness box where people could leave a book or a plant, or something someone has made, for someone else to have.”

Other ideas propose it becomes an information hub with a notice board and local business cards, or is painted red and gold to honour those who fought in both world wars.