The home parish
All residents and the majority of our trades. Two of our trustee meetings a year are held in the church hall here.
Community impact
A small geography, mapped honestly.
Our impact is not large. It is six almshouses in a single street; eight residents in those houses; fifteen volunteer befrienders, gardeners and stewards across five surrounding villages; and three trades that we have known by name for thirty years. This page is an attempt to be specific about all of that.
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Almshouses
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Residents
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Active volunteers
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Raised at last open garden
Places we work
The villages our volunteers come from.
Most of our active befrienders walk or cycle to the cottages. A few come by bus from the surrounding parishes — nowhere more than seven miles from Akeman Street. This is, in the proper sense of the word, parish work.
Three miles south
Holden & Sons, our roofers since 1974. Two Sunday Doors befrienders. The garden bench was made here, by the Aldbury joiner who is now retired.
Five miles west
Vale Sash & Frame, who care for our sash windows. One Sunday Doors befriender. One former resident, now living with her daughter.
A mile north
Our retired plumber. Two volunteer gardeners. The vicar of Wigginton sits as a guest at our autumn trustee meeting.
Six miles south-east
Our independent examiner of accounts. Two of our larger donors. The friend of the trust who runs our website, in his evenings.
Across the borough
Dacorum Borough Council, Hertfordshire Constabulary’s safer neighbourhood team, and the local authority adult social care liaison.
Named partners
The organisations we work with by name.
Not many; not large; almost all within a one-hour drive.
The Almshouse Association
The national membership body for almshouses in England and Wales. Provides governance training and the weekly contribution benchmarks.
Homes England
Co-regulator of the cottages as a registered provider of social housing.
Dacorum Borough Council
Housing benefit assessments, adult social care liaison for residents who need it, and the keeper of the parish boundary maps we still pin to the wall.
Tring Town Council
A standing invitation to our trustees’ autumn meeting. The annual community-grant programme we very occasionally apply to.
Parish of St Peter & St Paul, Tring
Sunday Doors befriending partnership since 1997, an annual carol service in the cottage courtyard, and the parish hall for our AGM.
Tring & District Local History Society
Help with our small archive of cottage records, and an open lecture at our sixtieth-anniversary tea in 2023.
Work with us