Bledington Community Shop & Café

Bledington Community Shop & Café sits on Church Lane in the village of Bledington, and it is genuinely owned by the community it serves — more than 300 local shareholders bought into it when it opened in November 2019, a decade after the previous village shop closed.

That backstory matters: this is not a co-op franchise or a council project but a society run on one-member-one-vote principles, with profits reinvested into the village rather than extracted. Much of the day-to-day operation is carried by a rotating team of volunteer locals, which gives the place a consistency of character you rarely find in a managed café.

The café is open seven days a week — weekdays and Saturdays from 9am to 4pm, Sundays and bank holidays until 3pm (1pm in winter) — and serves coffee from Stow Town Coffee alongside handmade cakes, sausage rolls, pasties, soup, and freshly prepared sandwiches, with a children's menu and daily blackboard specials.

The shop side runs an hour later and stocks bread from local bakeries, eggs, fruit and veg, meat from Todenham Manor, Hook Norton jams, and their own-label Bledington Old Orchard Gin. Walkers and cyclists coming off the Evenlode valley paths are as welcome as residents with a standing account — phone orders can also be placed for anyone who cannot get in.