Park cafe owners hard at work to prevent flooding

Owners of a borough cafe are desperately trying to avoid their premises flooding following hours of torrential rain.
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Shelley Guest, owner of Caffeina Cafe at Pennington Hall Park, Leigh, has been hard at work this morning to prevent rain water from flooding the premises.

Along with her husband Dave and volunteer Mark Bickerton, they have been working tirelessly to avoid a disaster. Wigan Council has provided sand bags to help quell the flooding.

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Shelley said: "We are due to reopen in three weeks. We've come along today because we started fitting a new outdoor kitchen, to make our takeaway service more accessible. We don't normally open until March, but people have said that during the last lockdown, when we were able to do takeaway, what a lifeline we were. So the plan was to open earlier.

"We've come down this morning to shift things around in the cafe, to find the water creeping in. So we had to move the new kitchen units up on some palettes. We've moved electrical items inside, and fortunately the council turned up with quite a large number of sandbags. We're just trying to protect the property because [the water] is only a foot away from coming inside."

She added: "We still hope to be on track for opening in three weeks, but if this weather continues it's obviously going to have quite a huge impact, not just on the cafe as a business, but those people we were hoping to be a bit of a lifeline for, who come to the park because they're on their own, and can just have a bit of human contact by grabbing a coffee."

"Fortunately we've got the sandbags now, because as we've stood here, it's increased by about a foot!

"We just hope for the best."

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