UIG SHOP
Community shopping
There’s a hive of enterprise at the Isle of Lewis’s most isolated village shop. From the bustling post-office and grocery to pioneering out-of-hours fuel and a commercial laundry, Uig’s new look Community Co-op, re-vamped recently to the tune of £500,000, is fast becoming the ultimate wilderness pit stop. Bought out by the community in 2004, the once tiny shop has undergone a transformation, tripling in size and services thanks to grants of over £500,000 from the likes of the Big Lottery and Scottish Executive.
The last cog in the project arrived last month in the form of two wind turbines which will provide direct heat for the shop as well as feeding surplus power to the mains grid. ‘After five tough years on this we are proud to now be fully eco, as well as customer, friendly!’ said manageress Elaine Newton. ‘We may still be a little shop on a big hillside, but our role out here will always be huge: not just a hub for local people to shop and meet but as an employer keeping people in the area.’
The 5kW wind turbines were installed last month by Shetland Wind Power. They will service the building’s under-floor heating and the generator will provide back-up during the regular power-cuts that affect Uig. Excess power can be fed back into the grid and resulting payments plied into the shop and business
‘It’s great seeing them up and helping to cut our energy bills with every turn,’ said Uig and North Lochs Councillor Norman A MacDonald. ‘I am optimistic that they will more than repay themselves within their life-time, while putting an end to the high costs we suffered before,’ The shop’s pre-turbine energy tab was around £5000 annually. Committee members hope to slash this to a fraction with the turbines. ‘In our opinion, renewables are the way forward and we are pleased to be seizing the initiative and doing this early,’ Norman added.
Bought by the community in 2004 when its last owners retired, the shop, which was shortlisted with three others – all mainland non-food shops - for the Scottish Independent Small retailer of the Year award in 2009, is one of a growing handful of community owned and run businesses in the Islands. Local shareholders own 11 percent of the business although all profits are ploughed back in to improving the facility. Many others have donated cash along the way including a mystery benefactor who recently donated £11,000 for a refrigerated van.
Serving one of the UK’s most sparsely populated areas, with a fragmented population of around 400, and with the next shop 20 miles distant, the shop’s purpose has to be two-fold: firstly to offer supplies and secondly, as a meeting place.
While offering a sensible range of services for locals, from fresh food bought through the Scottish Co-op and smaller Stornoway suppliers, to a Monday to Friday 24-hour fuel-up system for early bird commuters braving eighty-mile round trips to Stornoway, the shop also provides for the summer visitor influx, vital to the Uig economy.
‘The laundry is now non-stop, used by summer campers, local self-catering, and even a local football team,’ said Elaine, who returned from Manchester to Uig, her maternal home, in 2003. ‘Luckily their stripe is blue, so we don’t have too many bad grass stains to deal with!’ A small self service cafe and seating area is also popular with visitors, especially on wet and windy days when buses, and eateries, can seem particularly few and far between.
‘Outside of the main summer visitor season, we used to get people following the brown visitor signs all the way from Harris to find that there was nothing here,’ said Elaine. ‘It was embarrassing. So that’s why we felt it was important to have somewhere for people just to relax.’
Bright eyed and brisk, you would be forgiven for thinking that Elaine had been managing busy shops all her life. In fact, this is a first for her. ‘I was an innocent committee member and former full-time mum,’ she said. ‘When no one applied for the shop manager job after the first manager left, they all looked at me! If I had known that I would soon be overseeing a half million pound project I would have run a mile!’ she added.
She said one of the hardest parts of the last five years was deciphering funding application jargon: catchy ‘buzz words’ and endless abbreviations that seemed like a foreign language. ‘Sometimes you would just nod your head and act like you understood what some strange bit of terminology meant,’ she said. ‘There were a lot of early starts and late nights in those days!’
Even now, the shop’s nine staff, all local residents, know that they may have to work some odd hours. Power cuts are frequent and, in winter, snow and ice often cut off supplies. Accounts, orders, post office and funding paperwork all have to be dealt with daily.
Maintaining the turbines, however, is hopefully not something to worry about. They will be monitored remotely from Shetland thanks to computers wired into the towers. If something goes wrong local contractors will be instructed to fix it.
‘I think we all feel that things are settling down at last after a very hectic five years,’ said Elaine. In fact, she and her husband recently took their first holiday in years. ‘This time I really felt I deserved it!,’ she said.
Contact
Uig Community Shop, Timsgarry, Uig HS2 9JD
Tel: 01851 672444
