The new shop and post office was officially opened on 14th May 2011 after more than four years of campaigning and fundraising by the local community.
The first Post Office in Woodgreen was built as an extension to a 17th century thatched cottage in 1907. Stephen Marlow is recorded as having been the postmaster until about 1920.
By 1924, Woodgreen Post Office was being run by a Mrs Noyce from the front room of her house, now Meadow Cottage, further along the High Street.
The Post Office subsequently moved to (what is now) The Old Post Office House in the High Street - now a private dwelling. There were also two petrol pumps with wind-up handles, and a substantial grocery store, with living accommodation. There was also a bread round and, for a while, a taxi service.
In 1974, the Post Office returned to the original building, which had been an antique and bric-a-brac shop in the intervening years. It remained there until 2011.
In 2006, when the future of the shop and post office was in doubt, a public meeting was held with a view to taking it over as a community enterprise. We had only six weeks to set up the Woodgreen Community Shop Association, raise funds, get staff in place for both the shop and Post Office and form a steering group from which the Management Committee and sub-committees would be elected.
By 2008, having managed to run the existing shop successfully as a community-owned enterprise for a year, we started the much more difficult task of finding a site for the new, permanent premises. Some land owned by the Parish Council was offered leasehold and at a peppercorn rent, saving us the cost of land purchase and thus reducing what we needed to raise. In August, we appointed Architects Richard Swann and Nigel Honer of Bruges Tozer, near Frome in Somerset and over the following two years embarked on a vigorous fundraising campaign. And the rest, as they say, is history.