Case studies

Charlotte Inkle is a living example of Mansfield’s strong community spirit.

It all began during the Covid pandemic. Charlotte and some friends on the Bellamy Estate decided to decorate the area for Christmas, to cheer up children who were missing out on festive fun because of lockdown.

Local people found out and starting donating. In the end, more than £700 was raised to install Christmas lights in trees across the estate.

The Friends of Bellamy group was born, with Charlotte as its chair. Now it runs a wide range of activities, including monthly bingo, Easter and Halloween parties. More than 350 people attended a community party for the coronation of King Charles.

At Christmas, the Friends of Bellamy buys tickets for the panto at Mansfield’s Palace Theatre and provides them to local families at a massively reduced price – along with goodie bags so people don’t have to spend more on sweets and drinks at the show.

Charlotte is keen to point out that the Friends of Bellamy is a shared enterprise by residents who want to do the best for their community. “We get thank-yous and lovely feedback all the time. I love helping people, but it isn’t just me. We have a whole group of friends working very hard.

“The activities help with mental wellbeing. People say to us that they’d be sitting at home on their own otherwise, or where was previously nothing for their children to do. Little things are making a big difference.”

After leaving school without qualifications, Tom Sharp drifted between jobs. But one of them – doing agency work as a packer at Mansfield-based Plastek – was to be a turning point.

“Three months in, I overheard some chit-chat that the engineering toolroom manager was looking for help. I went and asked if I could go in on a trial,” says Tom. 

“I picked up some skills quickly, and they came up with an idea: because they were struggling to attract skilled people, why didn’t they take me on as an apprentice and put me through college?

“I was 23, I’d got no formal qualifications, and here was someone offering me the chance to get trained up in something I was enjoying. That was the start of my journey!”

Over the next few years, Tom would go on from his apprenticeship to complete an HNC and HND through Vision West Notts College. But Plastek didn’t stop there. They decided to grow their talent even further by putting him through a mechanical engineering degree.

Today, Tom is the Project Engineer at the world-leading packaging business, which makes items for household goods found in just about every home in the land. Tom is responsible for engineering products and processes which involve commissioning new, high-tech machinery and automated assembly lines.

“What I’ve ended up doing is something I’m passionate about. It also shows just how much industry there still is in Mansfield, and that there are businesses here nurturing people and offering them massive opportunities in life.

“I’m not really comfortable blowing my own trumpet, but I’m proud of what I’ve achieved and what Plastek made possible for me. I left school with very little. Now I’ve got an engineering degree, I’ve travelled the world with my job, and I guess I am proof that you can make it in Mansfield.”

Family owned and run, Linney is one of the most prominent home-grown business success stories – not just in Mansfield, but across the East Midlands.

What began as a bookshop in Mansfield town centre in 1851 is today an advanced marketing company that invests heavily in people and technology to support the work it does for some of the most well-known brands in the world – ranging from insight driven creative design, to an automated warehouse where wheeled robots collect products to be sent to customers.

It has also become Mansfield’s largest private sector employer, with around 1,000 people working across a business centred on a large site on Adamsway. Its creative, high-tech approach has attracted talented young people who might otherwise have left for jobs or university courses that took them away from the area.

The company describes itself as ‘restless since 1851’, which highlights its defining characteristic – the way it has constantly evolved and reinvented itself as time, technologies and markets have changed.

After the initial bookshop, it became a stationer, a newspaper publisher, a printer, and is today an integrated marketing services business – led by the fifth and sixth generations of the Linney family.

Michael Fisher, of Linney Create, says: “What we do here is amazing. But so many people in Mansfield probably don’t know about it, because we are a subtle family business and have a long-term view on life.”

Mansfield’s leisure centres are some of the most successful in the country.

All have seen a huge surge in popularity following the Covid pandemic, with user numbers up significantly – building on the inspiration of our Olympic champion swimmer Rebecca Adlington and Paralympic gold medallists Ollie Hynd and Charlotte Henshaw.

Water Meadows Leisure Complex, Oak Tree Leisure Centre and the Rebecca Adlington Leisure Centre are all flourishing. They are managed on behalf of Mansfield District Council by More Leisure Community Trust, working with Serco Leisure which has similar contracts nationwide.

In the category Best Club/Centre of the Year (Midlands) at the prestigious ukactive Awards, Oak Tree Leisure Centre has won an unprecedented three times in succession, recognising the quality of its staff’s work.

The awards involve secret ‘mystery shopper’ visits, when judges were able to witness the wide range of fitness and healthy living activities provided for the local community.