We are a registered charity and the Community Centre for the market town of Ringwood – over 100 clubs, societies and organisations regularly meet in our various halls and rooms. We also hire out our halls and rooms for functions, events and meetings.

Greyfriars was formed as a charity in 1958 with the Georgian house fronting Christchurch Road. Over the years, halls and an Activity Centre have been added.  We are also planning ahead to meet future needs in Ringwood and a major current project is to build a new Arts Centre – actually on the Greyfriars site.

Some of our activities are welfare based, aimed at helping people in the community who need support – this includes the popular minibus service

When you make a booking with us you are also supporting our work as a charity in serving the local Ringwood community.

The Ringwood Arts Centre team getting the message over and having fun in the Ringwood Carnival procession September 2016 (image with thanks to Organic Photographic)

Book Shop open daily

Charity Book Shop sales reach £16,000

Wyn’s Book Shop at Greyfriars passed £16,000 in sales during June 2017. It started life less than 5 years ago. This means around 40,000 quality second hand books have since been sold. All the books are generously donated in the first place and almost all sell at 50p, but children’s books, which are always in big demand, are only 20p.

Just recently the Book Shop, which is open to everyone daily and Saturday mornings, has substantially increased the popular paperback offering. This very much reflects demand. For the immediate future, hardbacks will be mainly sold at the big “1000 Sales”.

So, whilst the Book Shop is therefore very keen and grateful to accept good quality paperback donations, it regrets it can only take limited hardbacks like history, recent biographies, military and some specialist books such as art. Phil West and Peter van Aanroy took over as joint team leaders at 2 July ’17.