"There have been lots of benefits from the LHI project, for me as an individual and for the community as a whole.

I've made contact and worked with interesting local people who I probably otherwise would never have met, and found out a lot about Chard that I didn't know. I had a vague idea that it was connected with the lace industry, but I wasn’t sure how, when or who! This project has certainly helped me to understand the history of the town a bit more.

Having the CD available on hire from the Tourist Information Centre at The Guildhall in Chard, enables more local people, and visitors to the town, to find out more about Chard and what happened here.

I think that in order for a project like this to succeed it has to tap into whatever resources are already there in the community, and the partnership with the LHI provided the funding and the incentive to complement our local talents.

A wide range of the local community seems to have been catered for, bringing people together to work towards the same end, in creating a piece of community history and community arts work.

One of the things it has done is to encourage a group of people who had never done anything like it before to write a script creatively together, and they did such a good job that I'd be surprised if they didn't want to do more.

I'm sure the musical input will have long-lasting effects too. A couple of musicians were commissioned from the County's Adult Learning and Leisure Service, to work with people in local care homes to create the play's songs and music.

Looking to the future, there has been talk of the possibility of turning the audio project into a film, and of creating a community play based on it, or even getting the group together to work on another subject.

I hope more things will happen because it was great fun for everybody involved, a great learning experience, and it enabled us to bring together such a wide range of different skills and qualities from within the local community."