VILLAGERS who have grown tired of living in a broadband blackspot are teaming up to try to get fibre connectivity.

Schemes to connect rural parts of North Yorkshire and County Durham to the fibre broadband network over the last decade did not extend to Hurworth, near Darlington, and now residents are finding their connections increasingly slow.

Nearby, much smaller village Croft-on-Tees, which is in the North Yorkshire council area, is connected but the line was not extended up to most of Hurworth.

There are some tiny pockets in the village, closer to new housing developments, which enjoy faster broadband but most of the village has slow speeds.

Christine Fletcher, who lives on Hurworth’s Grange estate, has now started to gather names and addresses to see if she can get enough people together to either fund fibre, or look for outside funding to help connect their homes.

She has 50 addresses of homes in Hurworth, Hurworth Place and Neasham, which need better connectivity and is looking into what they can do to improve their broadband.

She said: “The coverage in the village, especially a village the size of Hurworth, is very, very patchy.

“We were trying to upload a video a few weeks ago and it took ages and ages for even just a really short video to upload to the cloud. I stumbled across this Openreach community funding for fibre broadband and thought, maybe we can do something about it.

“People aren’t committing to anything by giving me their name and address to add to the list, it’s just an expression of interest, and if I do submit it to Openreach it will only be the addresses on the list.

“Then we can look at what we do in the future, but before I send anything I’m having a look at other possible funding. I don’t have a lot of time or any specialist knowledge, and I’m not involved in the council or anything, I just started it to see what we could do about our poor broadband speeds.”

After posting on Facebook about the issue, Mrs Fletcher had a lot of feedback from people complaining that it was difficult to work from home or play games.

Superfast broadband was supposed to reach Hurworth and Neasham by May 2019 but Openreach said last year there was a problem with the roll-out.

Speeds in Hurworth Place are just a quarter of those in Darlington and half of that in nearby Croft.

l Hurworth area residents wanting to register interest for fibre broadband can email christine@christinefletcher.co.uk