Bovey Library

What a year we have had here at Bovey Tracey Library! As this has been our first full year in our lovely new home at the Riverside Community Centre we have been thrilled to meet lots of new customers, and to welcome back many familiar faces.

The challenges of covid-19 meant that we didn’t see lots of our regular customers for some time, but we were really happy to be able to offer our Choose & Collect service as we know how important reading is to our community.

Following on from the success of our online Book Group we launched a physical version back in August. A cluster of readers gathered to chat about books that we had recently enjoyed, and we all left with lots of titles to add to our huge TBR lists!

This summer saw the return of the Summer Reading Challenge. One hundred and thirty-nine children signed up this year and we were incredibly proud of all of the children who completed the challenge to read 6 books over the summer. We worked with Bovey Larder to run a competition asking children to create something useful out of their household rubbish to tie in with the Wild World Heroes theme. We had some fabulous entries and two very worthy winners!

Once the kids were all back to school, we began another new group in the library; Knit & Sew. Within a couple of days of launching we already had a lovely group of keen crafters who turned up to knit, crochet and chat over a brew and a biscuit, and it was just wonderful to hear people laughing together again.

Our Fun Palace returned at the beginning of October and we were blown away with the enthusiasm of our community for making paper doll garlands, building our town from LEGO and generally crafting up a storm! It was brilliant to have a much bigger space than in previous years, and we will continue to build on our exciting Fun Palace empire every year.

Looking forward to the new year we hope to join in with other local celebrations and are eager to see the return of our much-loved Bounce & Rhyme session. The last two years have been hard for everyone, but we are here for our community and will continue to help with local recovery and renewal in any way that we can.