A NEW shop in North Yorkshire with links to a village in India will help support a Bangladesh community.

Rickshaw will open in Malton’s Shambles on Saturday, September 2, and specialises in selling fair trade, recycled and ethically sourced gifts and homewares, along with arts and crafts from local designers and artists.

The owner, Mo MacLeod, has pledged to donate 10 per cent of any profits made by the shop to a school in Babuldung, a village in Bangladesh which her grandparents - Rev Alan and Margaret MacLeod - helped support as missionaries in the 1940s.

Mo said her grandparents travelled to Bangladesh - then Bengal - and worked there for 20 years with members of the Sentals, one of the region’s oldest tribes.

She said: “In 2013, three generations of my family – my dad, aunt and uncle, who were all born in Bengal, and me, my husband and our children – went on an adventure to Bangladesh to find the old Mission, and to visit one of the Santal villages, Babuldung, that my grandpa had helped to establish in the 1940s.”

The shop has been made easy to find in Malton, thanks to a colourful Rickshaw which has been parked outside the entrance, and which - along with her family connection - Mo said was something she had been inspired to introduce from travelling to India.

She said: “During our time in Dhaka, I took a photo of a rickshaw, just parked in a fairly run-down area of the city, and it struck me that the fabulous colours of the paintwork on the vehicle had the power to totally transform the whole environment.

“Dhaka has a great deal of unimaginable poverty, but the whole city is brought alive by the hundreds of thousands of coloured rickshaws everywhere. My shop is all about bringing a splash of colour to make you smile, so the name seemed appropriate.”

The shop is open six days a week, Monday to Saturday between 10am and 5pm, from this weekend.