Community Groups in Hersham

Hersham has no parish council. What speaks for the village instead is a voluntary sector, and since 2025 most of that weight has sat with a single organisation.

The Hersham Community Group

The Hersham Community Group was created by merging the two bodies that had represented the village separately, the Hersham Village Society and the Hersham Residents Association. Its constitution was revised on 1 October 2025, and it is run by a committee of nine, whose current members are listed on the group’s own site.

Membership is open to anyone aged 16 or over who lives or works in Hersham, or who simply supports what the group is trying to do. There is an annual subscription, and the amount is set by the members at each annual general meeting rather than fixed in the constitution.

The group states its purpose as representing the interests of the village, keeping residents informed and consulted, and supporting the social and recreational side of village life. In practice a great deal of its published activity is planning. Its own account names the former Hersham Golf Club land, the Air Products site and Turners Lane among the schemes it has engaged with, alongside the future of the shopping centre.

Positively Hersham

Planning work is carried out under the name Positively Hersham, which the group uses when it lodges objections and publishes its monthly reports. Anyone following a specific application will find those reports more current than any summary here, because they are issued month by month.

For the applications themselves, rather than the campaigning around them, our Hersham development and planning page draws directly on Elmbridge Borough Council’s own records and takes no position for or against any scheme. The two things are worth keeping apart: one is what has been applied for, the other is what a residents’ organisation thinks about it.

What came before

The Hersham Village Society was, unusually for a village body, a registered political party. The Electoral Commission’s register records it as registered on 21 February 2012, entitled to field candidates in England, and voluntarily deregistered on 30 June 2025. Registration of that kind is what allows a residents’ association to put its name on a ballot paper, and it is a familiar arrangement in Elmbridge.

The deregistration came a few months before the merged group’s constitution was adopted. The records show both dates; neither states that one caused the other.

The market, the club and the library

Three other organisations do a good deal of the village’s day to day gathering.

Hersham Village Market runs a weekly Friday morning market at All Saints Church Hall on Queens Road, with home-cooked food, local honey, preserves and eggs, and puts on larger seasonal markets at the same hall.

Hersham Sports and Social Club on Hersham Road runs a Live Music Club every Tuesday evening, free to attend and explicitly open to people who are not members.

Hersham Library on Molesey Road, run by Surrey County Council, carries most of the village’s regular groups for children and older residents between them: a bookchats reading group, a LEGO club, rhymetime and storytime sessions, and a digital support service staffed by volunteers.

Current dates and times for all of these are on our what’s on page, which is rebuilt nightly, rather than repeated here where they would go stale.

Getting involved

The Community Group takes new members through its own site, and the market, the club and the library are all open to anyone who turns up. For services rather than volunteering, schools, surgeries and council contacts are gathered on living in Hersham, and the equivalent listing for the wider borough is on our Walton community page.