CHILTON residents are celebrating after one of their county councillors dished up £5,000 to upgrade their church hall’s old kitchen.

Community members gathered for a celebratory lunch at St Aidan’s Church Hall yesterday (April 14) to make use of the new facility after County Councillor Christine Potts donated the money from her £20,000 neighbourhood budget to fund the scheme.

“The building itself is used by all sections of the community, not just the church people, and the kitchen they had was really old, dated and did not serve the purpose so to make things better I thought I would give them a hand,” Cllr Potts said.

“I tried to be as fair to every organisation within Chilton as possible and I know in the past I have given money out of the fund to the Roman Catholic church for kitchen facilities, and I have helped the Methodist church with the tarmac surrounding their chapel, so I felt that the church was the only other one that needed something.”

After about a year of hard work by the community, the new kitchen is now in place to serve the regular users, which can be up to 100 people at any one time.

“They are very pleased with it and they do a cracking job for the community,” Cllr Potts added.

Mike Morrison, vice chairman of St Aidan’s Parochial Church Council, said the whole community was delighted with the finished facility which was used to produce the three-course celebratory lunch and is currently used six days a week by different groups.

“It was a disaster as a kitchen and we could not operate it as a kitchen – it’s been in there for a long time and had an old sink and cooker so we just had to rip it all out,” he said.

“There has been quite a lot of cooperation from people in Chilton so we thought we should say thank you for this fantastic new facility.”