Bringing it all back home: Robin Murray and the Hallbankgate Hub
By Janet Lambert
How appropriate that Robin Murray’s final project unfolded on his own doorstep. He may be acclaimed worldwide, and he lived in London, but his ancestral home and his wider family were in the North Pennines, where he truly belonged. He grew up from the age of eleven on a windswept farm here and briefly attended primary school in the nearby coal mining village of Hallbankgate which, when he arrived in the early 1950s, was in the throes of post-industrial decline. Here, some sixty-odd years later, in the same village where he still had a home, he was able to put into place the essence of his philosophy.
The Naworth Collieries Cooperative store had been founded in 1873 by the miners themselves, on the business model and principles established by the Rochdale Pioneers. These included the sale of goods at market prices with profits issued as a dividend to members; voluntary work in and for the shop until profits enabled employment of staff; and high quality goods for sale where possible from local suppliers. Until the demise of the coalmines the Coop thrived, but as unemployed miners moved away the services offered were gradually curtailed and some of the buildings were sold off: “It was a business model that was exhausted”.
Takeover and refurbishment by the Penrith Cooperative in 1993 provided some respite, but eventually the Hallbankgate shop was seen to be failing and was closed by its new owners, Scotmid. A public meeting in the village hall in December 2014 drew over a hundred people, a steering group was immediately set up to rescue this vital local service, and we applied for and became a Community Benefit Society.
The aim was to acquire the premises and reopen as an attractive community hub, with the motto more than just a shop. From the start Robin provided invaluable guidance, ensuring that the spirit and principles of the Rochdale weavers and the Naworth miners would be reinvented for our times, but also that the Hub would be financially viable although nonprofit-making, and that once it was breaking even all debts incurred would start to be repaid. Any eventual profit would be used to improve the service, and thereafter recycled in the community. He delighted in the continuity of thought and ideals from the original cooperative pioneers – this project could not have been closer to his heart and to his roots.
Robin’s diplomacy was tested in the negotiation for purchase of the premises, from unyielding Edinburgh businessmen whose attitude seemed a long way from the founding ethos of the cooperative movement and who were determined to strike a hard bargain, at an unaffordable price which was, however, eventually whittled down. At one point, discussing alternatives to the apparent impasse, the idea of running the shop from a portacabin on the village green was mooted, and fortunately discarded – there would have been no scope at all for developing the project in any of the ways that the steering group foresaw and desired. The argument for rejecting Scotmid’s offer of a leasehold led to the necessity for raising more capital than we had ever considered, but in the end we owned the freehold. Robin’s skilful wording of successful grant applications to Power to Change and the Prince’s Trust meant that we could just scrape through financially and obtain planning permission for what was essentially an internal rebuild of the premises, dictated by the findings of the structural survey.
The business is now co-owned via shareholding by local people, and the management committee is entirely local, as are the volunteers without whom the enterprise could not exist. The aim was always to benefit people in a sparsely populated rural area of the North Pennines, and the inspired addition of a café not only increases profit margins but provides space for socialising. The Hub as it has grown from the initial vision is seen to bring the community together and increase wellbeing in a space designed to be attractive and welcoming. Robin’s thinking still underpins the cooperative ethos and pragmatic execution of what is primarily a service to the scattered rural community lacking public transport and many other amenities and gathering places.
His optimism about getting the refurbishment done by volunteer builders and electricians was sometimes misplaced – he thought the re-wiring of the entire premises could perhaps be done “in a burst at weekends” – and this showed that, great man of ideas though he was, his forte was not always in practical applications. He also anticipated goodwill and collaboration with local people that was largely forthcoming although in a few cases definitely not. He was always a little unhappy with the flaws of democratic procedure, and thus with the voting system of the management committee by a simple majority of those present, since he favoured government by consensus. As he was often unable to be present because of his other commitments, such as advising the troubled Syriza government in Greece, his voice might at times have gone unheard but for our lengthy telephone discussions engendering solutions which could then be argued with more conviction in committee meetings. Ideals generally have to be shaped by compromise, and here it was largely achieved in the spirit of fairness, goodwill, and good humour. He was not averse to speaking his mind, for instance regarding the wording of the contract for a shop manager – collaborative relations were the key, as he said, “the relation between the shop manager and the nominated Committee member should not be that between a line manager and a subordinate”, and workers’ rights should be upheld, especially the right to join a trade union.
The Hub was founded on a cooperative ethos and a creative vision, and its survival and success has been based on its sound business footing, but equally it depends hugely on the volunteers. They set up the steering group and the management committee, redesigned the premises, supervised the refurbishment, and dealt with materials purchase, publicity, marketing, staff contracts, accounting, health and safety, and so on – only the shop manager and café manager are part-time employees. The Hub will stand or fall by the strength of its volunteers – wonderful they are but there are never enough of them.
The business plan and vision still underpin the functioning of the Hub today, from the principles of community service and involvement through volunteering, to outreach via home delivery. Not all of Robin’s ideas have yet come to fruition, such as the “genius bar”, whereby teenagers would help the less computer literate, or the weekly surgery for health services, but this latent fund of ideas provides food for thought. There have been other subsequent initiatives entirely in the same spirit which have been successful, such as the art gallery, sale of local crafts, book exchange, a weekly spinning group, provision for touring cyclists, and more recently renting office space to the Fellfoot Forward project. The business plan anticipated and allowed for developments that would increase this effect, leaving space for future cooperative initiatives.
Few people involved in the Hub today, or even then, would have any notion of Robin’s crucial influence, but they are still actively pursuing the Hub’s development within the principled and egalitarian framework to which he contributed so much. Robin was a generous spirit and a visionary thinker who brought the full impact of his vision to our village shop, and provided that extra dimension that lifted it from what could have remained the banal recreation of a “convenience store” to an imaginative enterprise of considerable integrity and inbuilt resilience.
17 August 2020