Do you make beautifully crafted gifts or products? Would you like a stall at our Christmas Fair for just £10?

Places are very limited and we want to ensure we offer a varied selection for visitors, so please get in touch at your earliest convenience if you or anyone you know, is interested.

Email tracey/jefferies@adapt.co for more details.

This summer, the brand new Maggie’s Centre will open at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford, offering anyone with any type of cancer and their families and friends, the practical, emotional and social support that people with cancer need.

At such an exciting time, we are looking for new volunteers to join our Centre Support Team to help introduce as many people as possible to our new centre and show them the fantastic support Maggie’s can provide.

If you are sociable, confident and outgoing and willing to dedicate half a day a week to help Maggie’s, we would like to hear from you. For more information, please contact eleanor.green@maggiescentres.org or call 07920 848825. For more information about Maggie’s, please visit www.maggiescentres.org

Vale of White Horse District Council is seeking people to assist at polling stations for the European elections taking place on Thursday 22 May.

The hours are long (6:30 am to 10 pm) but the pay is quite generous.  Presiding officers get £200 for the day, while poll clerks get £120.  You can only apply to be a presiding officer if you’ve done it before or if you’ve been a poll clerk at least three times.

There are also jobs going to help with the poll verification and  the count.  The verification will take place after the close of poll at 10pm on 22 May until finished, and the count will be on Sunday 25 May commencing at 6pm.  Both will both take place at the Abingdon Tennis and Leisure Centre, Audlett Drive, Abingdon.

You can either fill in and return the form or if you wish to know more please contact Bev Lee, bev.lee@southandvale.gov.uk.

Click here for the application form

BT has enhanced its Better Broadband for Oxfordshire Web site to show more detailed plans per postcode area in the county.  All of the postcodes in Hinton Waldrist are showing with the status “Work Scheduled to Begin in 2015”.

The Web site is not very informative about what performance we can expect.  It states that “many homes and businesses in this postcode area will be able to order superfast broadband speeds (minimum 24 Mbps), while others will be able to order fibre broadband speeds of between 2 Mbps and 24 Mbps.” Based on this chart of broadband speed vs distance from the street cabinet,  and the location of the street cabinet serving Hinton (click here for more details) we would expect people living in the Row and along the High Street to enjoy speeds of at least 24 Mbps.  This will fall off up Church Road to perhaps 15 to 18 Mbps near the church.   A useful step up in performance from what we get today.

Less good news is that work isn’t scheduled to start until 2015.  We may still have 18 months to wait before we get this long overdue performance boost.

The images shown here were captured on the Better Broadband for Oxfordshire Web site on the postcode checker map. To see the map for Hinton, select area type “Parish” and then select area name “Hinton Waldrist.”

The Parish Council would like to update you on what is happening on the above matter. The current situation is:-

1. No planning proposals have been submitted by Smiths Gore yet.

2. We continue to make enquiries about the legal implications of building on the allotments.

3. The District Council has now registered the allotment site as an Asset of Community Value.

4. The Hinton Waldrist Allotment Society is now a member of the National Allotment Society.

5. We are monitoring the District Council’s “housing land bank” – unfortunately, despite major planning approvals at Grove, Faringdon and Kingston Bagpuize, the Vale is still under-achieving in its 5-years’ supply of new houses.

6. If we do hear anything more positive we will do a letter drop to all villagers.

7. Please feel free to comment using the form on this page below.

Peter Evans
Chairman

20 April 2014

We’ve recently learned that BT is planning to upgrade the broadband service available in Hinton.  Under a contract awarded to BT by Oxfordshire County Council, much of the county’s infrastructure is to be upgraded using “Fiber to the Cabinet” technology.  This should bring faster broadband speeds to Hinton.  We estimate that most of us in Hinton should be able to get speeds of between 15 and 25 Mbps – far faster than the typical 3-5 Mbps that we get today.  Current indications are that the new service should be available by the end of 2014, although BT have yet to make an official announcement about their plans for the Longworth Exchange area in which Hinton lies.

For more information about faster broadband in Hinton, visit www.hintonandlongworth.net.

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