Documenting the campaigns to keep open Grisedale Croft and to secure the future of community healthcare on Alston Moor.
Alston Moor is one of the most isolated rural communities in mainland England. The Alston Moor Parish Council is documenting and pursuing two parallel campaigns — to keep Grisedale Croft open, and to restore community healthcare to the Ruth Lancaster James site.
Each has its own story, its own working group, and its own folder in the Vault. Both rest on commitments that have already been made.
Grisedale Croft is the only residential care home on Alston Moor and the residential half of the 2018 NHS-and-Council settlement that followed the loss of in-patient beds at the Ruth Lancaster James Cottage Hospital. The Parish Council, working with this community, intends to hold them to it.
The cottage hospital served Alston Moor for over a century. Its in-patient beds were closed in 2018 on the basis of commitments that have only ever been half kept. This campaign asks the ICB to recognise the integrated model the community designed in 2014 — and which the country now calls a Neighbourhood Health Centre.
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The future of Grisedale Croft matters to every household on Alston Moor, and this is the moment to show it.
Read more →Westmorland and Furness Council (WFC) has extended its consultation on the future of Grisedale Croft Care Home by two weeks, to 19 August, and has corrected the information it gave the public.
Read more →We have brought the case for keeping Grisedale Croft open into one place — the documents the NHS and Cumberland Council have now disclosed, and the Working Group's letters to the Council.
Read more →Alston Moor folk have seen many promises broken before. Consultation results not being paid attention to by the very authorities who have asked our opinion. Our scepticism is earned. However, across Britain, communities have faced the same threats — and some have succeeded. Their experience informs how these campaigns work.
From legal letters to packed public meetings, families and communities across Britain have reversed care home closure decisions. Here is what worked.
Read the cases →Rural towns facing “temporary” closures, vacancy excuses, and closed-door decisions. Some refused to accept it. Here is how they did it.
Read the cases →The Vault is the working group's shared archive. The items below are flagged public so anyone can read them.
Email from Alix Martin to the Rt Hon Andy Burnham MP, sent 20 July 2026, the day he took office as Prime Minister. Reframes the case as an offer: Alston Moor's isolation makes it small and measurable enough to prove the Neighbourhood Health programme works. Sets out what has been lost since 2014 and asks for a joint decision on Grisedale Croft, national test-site status for health and regeneration, and a visit.
Sent the day after the Town Hall public meeting of 16 July 2026. Sets out what Alston Moor has already lost since 2014 and formally requests a joint meeting of WFC, NENC ICB, the Parish Council and the League of Friends, with the authority to decide.
A summary of what the campaign's Freedom of Information requests have established, drawn from the disclosed public records — including the documents that record the 2017 commitment that the in-patient beds would not close until the Grisedale Croft replacement was in place. Each point links to the original thread on WhatDoTheyKnow.
It asks the Council, while the consultation is open, to place on the public record the evidence behind the cost figures presented to residents.
Working group members can upload, tag, and organise the full archive.
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