Gravesend gurdwara volunteers feeding NHS workers

Volunteers at a Kent Sikh temple have been cooking thousands of hot meals for NHS staff.

Three days a week volunteers at the Guru Nanak Darbar Gurdwara in Gravesend start cooking at 04:00 GMT for staff at the Darent Valley Hospital in Dartford.

For the rest of the week the gurdwara's kitchen is busy with people cooking food for vulnerable people in the Gravesend area.

The gurdwara is the largest in Europe and has hundreds of volunteers.

"If you go to any gurdwara you will always get food," says Jagdev Singh Virdee, of the Guru Nanak Darbar Gurdwara.

"We have a community kitchen where everybody cooks together and eats together."

The gurdwara, in Saddington Street in Gravesend has hundreds of volunteers to call on, Mr Virdee said.

They are divided into small teams to ensure social distancing measures are followed.

"One team will cook, another will pack the food, the other will deliver it. It's a complex operation," Mr Virdee said.

It is an operation the volunteers are used to, he said.

At the peak of the first lockdown the volunteers at the gurdwara were providing 1,000 meals a day to key workers and vulnerable people.

They also made thousands of hot meals for lorry drivers stranded on the M20 over Christmas, as well as bags of mince pies.

Mr Virdee says: "We are trying to keep the NHS and vulnerable people served with our food for as long as we can."

He said 80 meals had been delivered to people in their homes on Sunday, with 150 meals going to Darent Valley Hospital staff on Monday.

"We've just had a request from another hospital and a nursing home, so numbers will be going up over the coming weeks," Mr Virdee said.

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