How community rallied to save the service that holds it together

This local shop was saved from closure because the people who use it refused to give up. Now, a new shop is being built, complete with a cafe, which will benefit the community for generations to come.

- Robert Harries reports

IN APRIL 2008 the UK Government announced that more than 2,000 Post Office branches across the country would close. It was a move, we were told, that would "modernise and restructure services".

In reality its main achievement was to drag parts of Wales, particularly rural areas, into a modern age where community spirit is becoming harder to maintain, where neighbours are strangers, where half-hour drives to the nearest town offer the best opportunity of companionship.

The loss of a village shop and post office can decimate communities. Jobs are lost, social hubs wiped out. Property values go down, isolation goes up.

Whether a pub, shop, post office or village hall, communities need something, otherwise a village is little more than a place you travel through on the way to somewhere else.

As part of the nationwide changes made in 2008, Dryslwyn Community Shop and Post Office, serving the hamlet of Dryslwyn and the village of Cwrt Henri in Carmarthenshire, faced the reality of a new way of life.

Set in the gorgeous Towy Valley between Carmarthen and Llandeilo, this community was to lose its focal point - the post office that had served its people since the mid-1800s but was no longer financially viable. The post office closed on March 28, 2009.

But thanks to dozens of volunteers, various donations and plenty of community spirit, the shop reopened less than a week later on April 3, 2009, this time as a not-for-profit, volunteer-led project. It proves that if there is a will, there is always a way.

That was almost 17 years ago and the shop is still thriving. In 2021, it won the Queen's Award for Voluntary Service - the highest honour awarded to a voluntary group.