On the morning of Saturday 18 April 2026, at twenty-eight minutes past ten, with about thirty tenants and trustees standing in a loose semicircle, the chair of the trust turned a brass tap at the foot of a new standpipe at Carr Bank, and water came out. There was a small round of applause, and then everyone went back to weeding.
This is, in the proper sense, a small story. The trust has been turning taps on and off at Carr Bank since 1916. What made this one notable was the long road back to it. The western half of the site had been served, for thirty years and more, by a single hand-pumped well sunk by tenant volunteers in the late 1980s, and a corresponding eighty-metre unrolling of garden hosepipe each summer. In a wet year that arrangement was fine. In a dry year — and we have had three of those in five — the upper plots dried out by the time water reached them, and the lower plots got too much.
A standpipe is a small thing. A standpipe that everyone has been waiting twenty years for is not.
Where the money came from.
The fund for the standpipe was opened in February 2024 with a target of £8,000 for three taps, the trenching, the brass fittings, and the council permissions. £2,400 came in within the first three months from regular donors. A further £3,200 was donated in the late summer of 2024 by an anonymous Mansfield resident who had been a plot-holder at Carr Bank between 1968 and 1981 and asked, very gently, that we not name him. The final £2,400 came from the Mansfield Building Society, who matched our open campaign through their Community Match programme.
We had hoped, optimistically, to commission all three standpipes by Easter 2026. In the event, the cold spell in late February delayed the trenching by a fortnight. The first standpipe was therefore commissioned a week later than planned. The other two are scheduled for July and September 2026, weather and council permissions permitting. We will write again when they are on.
What is actually different now.
Watering a plot on the western half of Carr Bank used to be a small expedition: you walked the hosepipe down from the central tap, you negotiated who else needed it, and you carried a can back to your plot two or three times. From this morning, the longest walk from any plot on the western half to the new tap is forty-six paces. That is approximately the length of three full-size plots, or one and a quarter cricket pitches. It will save, by a small calculation we will not bore you with, somewhere in the order of 180 volunteer-hours a season.
It will also, less obviously, change who tends what. Plots furthest from the previous well have, for years, been gently easier to acquire than plots near it. Tenants who were assigned to the back row sometimes gave them up after a season, and we did not always understand why. We hope, quietly, that some of those plots will be more attractive after this morning. We will know in a year.
What we got wrong, while we are on the subject.
Two things. First, we underbudgeted, by about £600, the cost of the brass fittings. Brass prices rose between writing the campaign page in February 2024 and ordering in March 2026. The shortfall was covered out of reserves and will be replaced from the building society's match by July. Second, we lost most of a Saturday in March trying to fit a standard tap-head to a non-standard pipe-thread, and the fitter who eventually came out to help was Stuart Wakelin's brother-in-law. We are recording this in case it is useful to anyone else.
What we would like to thank.
The fitter, Mr Holmes of Pelham Pipework, who waived the call-out charge. Mansfield Building Society's Community Match programme. The anonymous donor of August 2024. The thirty-two regular donors who give monthly to the trust and asked, when we wrote to ask them, that we use their gifts for the standpipe fund this year. Every tenant who carried a hosepipe for the last thirty years. And, on the day, the child with the tin basin, who would prefer not to be named in print.
The next standpipe is scheduled for the week beginning Monday 13 July 2026, weather permitting. There is no event for it; we will turn the tap on quietly and you will hear about it, in due course, in the next dispatch.