WATCHET HARBOUR Community Bookshop has reached its 13-year fund-raising target of £150,000 for cystic fibrosis research.

At a celebration event at Watchet Bowling Club on Tuesda, the Cystic Fibrosis Trust’s Serena Wilson accepted a cheque for £4,777 which brought the bookshop’s donations to the target which had been set shortly after the project was started in 2009.

The bookshop’s fund-raising for the trust will continue when it reopens next year, plus grants to local organisations, which currently total more than £80,000.

The initiative was originally set up in memory of cystic fibrosis sufferer Tom Woollam who died in 2007, aged just 28.

Two years later, his parents, retired teachers Melanie and Alan Woollam, who live in Watchet, launched the bookshop to raise funds which would be split between the Cystic Fibrosis Trust and local charities and good causes.

Committee chairman Jeff Bird said that despite the disruption caused by Covid and the rebuilding of their Esplanade shop, donations of top quality books continue to flow in “but we are always looking for more, and now have rooms for both fiction and non-fiction books which always need replenishing.”

After Watchet Coastal Communities team took over the building, in need of major repair, it has undergone complete refurbishment and was handed back to the bookshop last year.

Run by 40 volunteers, the bookshop was recently visited by Somerset High Sheriff Jennifer Duke. “She was very impressed by the books, the building, and the way the place was run,” Jeff Bird said.

The bookshop closes for the winter at the end of the month but inquiries about how to donate books can be made to 01984 634749.