Kind-hearted shoppers bring joy to elderly community

Once again, shoppers have ‘eggs-elled’ themselves in The Mercury’s Easter Egg Appeal.

On the lead up to Easter, The Mercury shopping centre in Romford has been asking its shoppers to pick up an additional chocolate egg when out shopping for their family and drop it into the giant Egg Pod at the Centre so that they can distribute to our elderly Romford community.

“With such challenging times confronting us all we were surprised at how generous our customers have been in their donations” says Spencer Hawken, Centre Manager at The Mercury.  “This year we were also really pleased with the external support that we received from our retailers, Wilko and Poundland who also donated over 50 eggs to the cause”. 

The Centre decided that it would continue with this tradition in light of the Covid-19 circumstances as a lot of the elderly community would be spending Easter either in isolation or on their own. This was also a perfect opportunity to also deliver some additional nutritional food items to people who may not be finding it easy to get out to the shops. Luckily the centre have been in contact with companies ‘Borna Milk’, ‘Dorset Cereals’ & ‘Palmers’ (hand cream) who offered additional goodies to the giveaway. 

One of the Portland Close residents, Hilda (pictured) happily posed with her Easter treat from a distance.  Hilda is 90 years old and self-isolating for 12 weeks to keep well, she said  “It is nice to think that people are thinking about you during this time – and receiving this gives me a good opportunity to [phone]call around the other ladies in the flats to see what egg they got, and also ask if they saw the handsome young man who delivered them!”

“Although we didn’t have the chance to pop in and see the residents this year, we posted letters to residents and we did get a couple of shouts of appreciation from residents down the hallway as they opened their doors to find an Easter package on their doorstep!” continues Spencer. 

The deliveries to Ravensbourne Nursing Home and Portland Close Residential Home were made by Natalie, the deputy centre manager, and Jon and Kris our security and contract managers on separate days