JUST the smell of fresh bread is enough to stir the senses.

And in this creative space there is a whole lot of mixing and kneading going on, as organic flour, water, yeast and salt, the basic bread-making ingredients, are pummelled to create baked perfection.

Welcome to Love Bread, the community support bakery described by its website as bringing the benefits of baking real bread to Brighouse and Calderdale communities.

Just as bread is baked to be shared, the idea behind the initiative was to share skills and expertise, along with the love of bread, with local schoolchildren and community organisations.

And it all began when Carole Roberts bought a loaf of real bread from a community bakery. Eager to find a local outlet, she was encouraged to bake her own.

"I had a recipe book, I looked in it and made my first loaf!" recalls Carole. "You eat it, love it and keep making it."

Whetting the appetites of the tasters who sampled her bread, Carole decided to pursue the idea of developing a community project.

"We started to put some feelers out about doing it on a bigger scale and we started hiring a local high school kitchen," she explains.

A series of 'very fortunate events' along with support from the Brighouse Business Initiative, and some funding from the Community Foundation for Calderdale, led to the project finally getting off the ground.

Three years since its inception as an idea, Love Bread has recently expanded launching a community kitchen alongside the bakery it converted over a year ago from a former electrical unit in Martin Street, Brighouse.

Here part-time bakers Carole, Richard Hickson and Fran Lister are creating their artisan breads every day except Wednesday and Sunday, to sell around local markets, wholefood shops and other outlets such as Foodworks in Bradford, a social enterprise working with adults with learning difficulties.

"We were all home bakers and all enjoyed that kind of aspect of home baking," says Fran.

"We really love making bread. It is so versatile, it is really hard to go wrong making bread and you can do a lot of different flavours and there are lots of ways of baking bread."

Fran explains the business operates as a not-for-profit social enterprise with volunteers making up the manpower.

"Part of the ethos is to share how to bake and try to teach that around real bread.

"We only use four basic ingredients; flour, water, yeast and salt, that is our basic bread. If you are making a seed loaf you put seeds in it. We don't have any preservatives or additives, we use organic ingredients locally sourced, wherever possible."

Expansion into the adjoining premises has enabled Love Bread to create a community kitchen offering regular workshops such as the family breadmaking sessions held during the Easter holidays.

Carole says the impetus for setting up the community kitchen was to satisfy demand for the courses.

"The bakery was getting too busy, we couldn't run both from the same venue so we thought 'let us see if we can do it at the same time?'

Says Fran: "The idea is people can use it as a community space."

"Anything we make gets re-invested into the community, into our project."

Love Bread are also developing their links with local schools. Fran explains one of their bakers recently returned to the classroom to pass on breadmaking skills to youngsters. They also run similar sessions with community groups.

"It's getting children used to baking from scratch and cooking from scratch," says Fran.

She says the process of weighing out ingredients can help with their mathematical skills. They can also achieve something swiftly and easily and it is carrying on a tradition.

"We are losing a lot of these skills because they are not passed down from generation to generation as they used to be," adds Fran.

Skills ranging from basic bread making to advanced techniques of shaping and flavourings are covered in the workshops.

"It's brilliant, " says Fran. "And it is working with people you wouldn't normally work with in a normal day. We have volunteers from people doing GCSE food technology to people who are retired. Working with people with different experiences it is lovely and it is a really lovely environment. People share and help each other all the time.

"And it is really creative. We try new flavours, new ways of baking bread we are working with."

She says while baking 300 loaves for a community event can put the pressure on, baking bread and passing on those traditional skills can be therapeutic.

It's also a passion: "People have a real emotional connection with bread; the smell of it, the feel of it and just generally I think," says Carole, who spent a decade working for Waterstones book shops before re-training to become a primary school teacher after having her children.

Carole recalls her grandma baking. "My gran baked a bit but we are not one of those families with secret recipes that are passed down. We come at it at a random angle, but for me it is being part of a community thing."

They've proved the project is a success and now they are spreading the word through their work within the community and also with social enterprises and charities, similar projects to Love Bread.

"We find that people say 'my Grandma used to make it' or their mum used to make it - people always seem to remember and it is amazing when people say 'oh I love bread.' It is a very simple thing which has been around for thousands of years in different forms and everybody has a little history of it," says Carole.

* For more about the events, or to find out more about volunteering with the organisation, visit lovebread.org.uk