View from the hills

Given its close proximity to the City of Worcester some may be forgiven for thinking that Kempsey village sits within the city’s boundaries, but that is emphatically not so. It is in fact the largest parish in the Malvern Hills District.

Kempsey is a very large parish valued for its strength of community feeling and the quality of rural life it affords, stretching as it does across 5 square miles and with its surrounding settlements of Green Street, Kerswell Green, Stonehall Common, Clerkenleap and Broomhall has more than 3000 residents, making it considerably larger than the towns Upton and Tenbury.

Kempsey is well furnished with the necessities of life: it has a farm shop, a general store offering the widest range of goods and services, a convenience store, a filling station, a busy Post Office that also serves surrounding villages, 8 pubs/restaurants, 4 nurseries, a large senior citizens’ residentia complex, a nursing home, a surgery/pharmacy, 4 business complexes and upwards of 130 businesses and a larger caravan site and yacht club by the river. And for open spaces it has a large sports field and over 200 acres of common land owned by the Parish Council. Kempsey looks after its youth: the Youth Centre, is home to Scouts, Cubs, Guides, Brownies and St John’s Ambulance as well as a Play Group, and an internet centre for the young and a Forest School in adjacent woodland. Nor are the elderly neglected – The Day Care Association meets every Tuesday.

It is not a sleepy village, but one that is looking to develop and go forward. Kemspey knows its own mind and what it wants, having adopted a Parish Plan in 2005 based on the largest in-depth survey of residents’ wishes and aspirations ever carried out. Nearly 1400 responses to 400 questions provided the statistical basis for the Parish Council’s submissions to the Local Plan, the County Waste Core Strategy, assessments of housing needs, the review of the conservation areas in the village and most recently the review of the Regional Spatial Strategy and its application to South Worcestershire.

Residents have one overriding requirement – to keep a significant gap between Kemspey and the City of Worcester.

What has been achieved since the Parish Plan was adopted;

The Community Centre, housed in a hundred year old school building faced closure or extensive redevelopment. Residents wanted to keep it, so the Council embarked on a large investment to turn it into a thriving complex housing two business important to village life – a hair dressing salon and a nursery with Before and After School clubs, but retaining facilities for public meetings and smaller club activities. A new ground floor parish office meeting disability requirements and equipped with the latest IT systems was built.

The Parish Council was one of the first to become a Quality Parish status in South Worcestershire, being an early implementer of the Lengthsman scheme and a pioneer in the use of e-planning with the District Council.

Kempsey’s sporting heritage is being preserved, with near-saturation use of the sports ground by 2 senior and 6 junior football teams, cricket teams, including a newly-formed girls’ team and a thriving Tennis Club. The common land provides the perfect open space to enjoy stupendous views of the Malvern Hills and to roam the 62 miles of rural footpaths and bridle ways. A welcome return to the grazing of cattle has also been achieved, in addition to the sheep and horses regularly seen on the commons.

What next?

There has been continuous human occupation in and around Kempsey for 3000 years. Iron age man, Romans, Saxons, Normans, Kings, Princes and Bishops, a Pilgrim Father, Cromwell’s army and Sir Edward Elgar have all figured in and shaped the history of the village. As ever, the main concern is to preserve it from threats - flooding from the Hatfield Brook that drains such a large catchment area, and the rise of the Severn - and the weight and speed of traffic along the A38.

For the future the need is for the Hatfield Brook to be tamed, with some part designated as a wildlife corridor, and a flood protection scheme at its junction with the Severn.

More visible policing and measures to make the A38 safer are a priority, while for building the future extra space and facilities for sport are needed, as is a solution to the secondary education problem in the village: over 200 children a day have to taken by bus to school.

As the Parish Plan made clear Kempsey needs to get better, not just bigger, but as, inevitably the village grows a new, multi- purpose Community Centre is an emerging requirement.

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