STOKE MANDEVILLE PARISH COUNCIL
THE VILLAGE GREEN
The Village Sign
The village sign was commissioned for the 2000 millennium and has been on the village green since then. Over that time it became worn and faded so the parish council decided to get it refurbished. There is a plaque on the post of the sign saying the original was designed and produced by Brian Gaze of Ixworth in Suffolk so we tried to track him down only to find he had retired many years ago. We did find some other examples of his work though and contacted some other parish councils that had used him. We eventually ended up at The Village Sign People in Norfolk. It turned out that one of the people at that company had been trained by Brian and may even have worked on our original sign.
Removing the sign was a challenge. The Clerk and Assistant Clerk got a couple of step ladders and tried to lift the sign off the top of the post but it was far heavier than we thought and the step ladders were not tall enough or stable enough. They abandoned that attempt and had to go to plan B and hire a scaffold tower.
Here are photos of the sign before and after refurbishment and the day it was put back up.
Trees on the Village Green
In mid 2022 we decided to investigate having the trees pruned to tidy them up and get them ready for lights to be fitted later in the year but we ended up doing rather more than that.
The biggest tree on the green was a lime tree. When the tree surgeon looked at it, he pointed out that it was multi stemmed tree and a crack had started to appear. He also told us that it would continue to outgrow the adjacent trees and was smothering them and stopping them growing.
We decided to have the lime removed so that the 3 oaks can now be seen in their full glory. The medium sized one will take a while to recover but the large one now looks magnificent and a lovely shape now it has been pruned. See the before and after photos below.
