COMMUNITIES throughout South Lakeland and beyond are striving to maintain services they see as essential to the well-being of the local population.

These facilities take on many guises. Here it may be a pub, there it may be a post office, somewhere else it may be a school.

But when the saving of a service is championed, the laws of supply and demand cannot be ignored totally.

Whatever funds are raised to back a campaign, especially if public money is pledged to support the fight, all efforts can be in vain if the community as a whole fails to use whatever it is that has been saved.

Further funds will be much harder to raise for maintenance, wages and other costs that will inevitably be incurred. Sustainability is the key.

There have been a couple of splendid examples in the area recently of communities that have apparently achieved their aim.

The Lowick School saga has been well documented and is now running as an independent.

In Storth a threatened village store and post office has been rescued by villagers forming a co-operative to run it. Good luck to the residents. They deserve it.

A similar scheme in Burton-in-Lonsdale is also looking like bearing fruit, with more than £44,000 pledged in low or non-interest loans to keep the local village store and post office.

There is still some way to go and more money still is needed to enable the purchase of the building and run the business, but a working group is trying hard to make its scheme work.

Less good is the news from Grange where Berners Swimming pool which was only opened in the summer of last year faces closure unless another £5,000 a month can be found.

This is a case of a local community receiving help from the Lottery fund to get the £3.4 million necessary to turn the idea into reality.

However memberships have been disappointing and local caravan clubs and other businesses with an interest in the tourist trade are being urged to make contributions as trade from visitors is seen as essential to maintain the sort of usage that the pool needs to keep going.

The message in this case is the same as all such projects. It is fine having a dream. It is even better if the community pulls together to turn that dream into a reality.

But all such projects are doomed to failure unless the facilities that are saved or created are not supported by continued patronage.

Us it or lose it, is indeed the catch-phrase that defines such community efforts.

Fiasco fans fury...

HOWLS of protest from traders and motorists in Kendal town centre at the impending digging up of roads by gas contractor, Transco, are hardly surprising.

It seems only weeks ago that United Utilities returned to finish the large scale replacement of water pipes in the town.

Transco can hardly plead ignorance of the earlier operation as two or three times the water workers sliced through gas pipes, causing leaks which required emergency repairs.

No, Transco claim that a joint operation with their utility colleagues would not have been possible as the streets are too narrow for two gangs to work side by side and the roads would have had to be closed completely. At least this way the traffic can be kept flowing, although at times not so one would notice.

Surely one lot of digging could have been integrated with sequential pipe replacement. At least that way the crews would have been on hand to deal with each other's emergencies.

At least with United Utilities local traders were fully consulted and the work was phased to minimise disruption to business.

This time only three weeks notice has been given, and it has been timed to coincide with the busiest shopping period of the year. No wonder the traders are squealing.

Just wait until a gas worker punctures one of the new water pipes.

Still, at least when the work is complete, everyone can look forward to the next raising of the tarmacadam - for the smooth implementation of pedestrianisation.

That is unless the electricity board gets in first.