Save our Shop!

Dear friends, it is with great sadness that Jade and I are writing this message. As some of you may know, we took on a lease and began our Wild Ginger journey last September and after an extensive and expensive refit we opened our doors in April this year welcoming customers into our cafe-cum-plant centre and fulfilling a lifetime ambition doing so.

Along the way we've met some wonderful people who have become friends of the shop, and have felt the warm embrace of the people of Mersea Island who have been so supportive of our vision to create a destination garden and cafe to benefit the wider community.

We were unaware however that an adventure that started with such hope would take a dark turn before we were able to establish ourselves! You see, the owners of our building are a charity, the David Rogers Estate Ltd, who have not been acting fairly towards us since January this year when we received a letter from two 'trustees' that we had no prior dealing with who told us they were taking over the management of our building and that our existing lease was invalid! Since this time we've had endless meetings and emails exchanges with the various individuals who identify as charity trustees or agents acting on their behalf to resolve the issues.

The charity have given conflicting promises about their plans for OUR shop which included a new extended lease, a community grant and building modifications to allow us to grow. We have also suffered countless intrusion into our business operations which have had a negative impact on our takings, lost the opportunity to access government grants and seen the withdrawal of two investors due to uncertainty over the long-term security of our lease.

Sadly, none of the promises made by the Charity came to fruition and led to us recently expressing our frustrations to the charity in writing.

Their response to this has been to threaten us with forfeiture of our lease and to instruct a barrister to send us threatening letters about an imminent eviction! We don't think this is fair, and are sure such action is unlawful but are up against wealthy adversaries who can afford to pay barristers to bully and harass us into submission.

As a new business we have poured our savings and taken out every credit option available to us. We are financially able to meet our costs of sales and staffing but have no way to finance a costly and lengthy legal battle with a charity (who have never made any charitable donations to anyone). We currently stand to lose everything. Our business. Our investment. Our future.

So, dear friends, we turn to you in our hour of need and humbly ask for the collective support of the wonderful community based on this island. If you are able to donate we have a gofundme page which we will use to get the expert legal advice and support we need to bring a case against the charity.

If you have any valuable legal skills that could help us we'd love to hear from you, and if you have neither money nor skills that could help us, could you take the time to share this post far and wide to get as many people to see this as possible? Any help is gratefully received!

Yours hopefully,

Jon & Jade and the team at Wild Ginger Homestead Kitchen and Garden.