Royal Mail workers rolled up their sleeves to help renovate a flood-hit property for charity.
Staff from the postal firm gave up a day to pitch in and help Cumbria Gateway, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation charity, transform a building in Carlisle’s Warwick Road that was ravaged during Storm Desmond.
The charity has recently bought the five-bedroom building and is in the process of turning it into a new rehabilitation centre, giving people on their programs a place to live.
Help was on hand as a group of 11 Royal Mail staff turned up at the property to help the charity make some progress on the huge renovation job.
The property’s ground floor needed all of its floorboards taken out and completely re-plastered then painted.
“It would’ve taken us a lot longer to do without them,” said Tom Hurst, the chairman of the Cumbria Gateway board.
“We’ve got a skip delivered and the Royal Mail people have filled it, it was chock-a-block. These guys have been brilliant, they’ve done a sterling job in a short space of time.”
Mr Hurst added that the charity hoped to have the work on the building complete by the end of this month.
Leading the Royal Mail army, who all work in their training department, was Alan Wood.
He told the News & Star: “For us it was about putting something back into the community. Coming here was two-fold, it’s a bit of team bonding because we work all over the north of the UK and we don’t get together often.
“We were looking for a good cause and Carlisle was in the middle of our patch. The people that this is going to, support work with folk who have mental health problems and one of our supported causes is mental health so it sits nicely alongside that.”
The work carried out by the mail workers is the latest example of the spirit of Cumbria which attracted worldwide praise for the way the county rallied in the wake of Storm Desmond.
Some of those who have done so much to help others were honoured at the #Spirit ofCumbria awards – hosted by CN Group supported by Sellafield Ltd and United Utilities – on Friday night.