For more than 50-years the Cheam and Sutton Christmas charity float has brought joy to the area.

This year, it continued to do so and managed to visit four of it's Covid revised routes before it was drastically put to a halt.

Cheam and Sutton Rotary Santa’s Sleigh has been visiting the streets of Sutton since 1966, lifting Christmas spirits with its festive themed van.

On Saturday, December 19, the club sadly announced that their popular sleigh visits had to be cut short due to Tier 4 restrictions.

"We are very disappointed to have to curtail the sleigh travels for this year - even the restricted scheme we had with no stopping," a club spokesperson said.

"We wanted to run the sleigh because so many children from 0-100 come out every year to see the sleigh and it is one of the highlights of the festive period.

"We get so many lovely messages on social media of the excitement building up to the sleigh's travels.

"This December we have excelled in adapting to the Covid-19 restrictions.

"We covered 4 of the 9 planned routes- in a normal year, it would have been 8 of 18 as we doubled up the normal route.

"We are running a Virtual Santa's Grotto, with special events with the Sutton Women's Centre, and tonight in lieu of the Sleigh, we are having our first Facebook Live event with Santa."

Cheam and Sutton Rotary will continue to support the boroughs charities with a Just Giving page.

Donations reached £631 out of the targeted £5,000 at the time of publishing.

For more information visit here and here.