A tiny village of wooden cottages in Shrewsbury, England, where old cats live out their final years, is circulating online again this week, under a headline about elderly cats being saved from euthanasia. The village is real, and it has been there since 2009. The newer part of the story is that its cottages are wearing out, and the volunteer charity behind it is now asking sponsors to pay for six replacements.
Who runs the cat retirement village
The village belongs to Shropshire Cat Rescue, a rehoming charity based in Shrewsbury, in the English county of Shropshire. It is run entirely by volunteers, has cared for more than 13,000 cats over more than 35 years, and also handles strays, kittens and feral colonies.
Most of its cats are put up for adoption. The village is for the ones who will not leave. The charity describes its residents as cats who, because of age or illness, cannot realistically be rehomed, so it keeps them for life rather than cycling them through the adoption pens.
Inside the village
- The layout: six chalets, each built for up to four cats, plus a larger shared building nicknamed the Moggies Mansion, where residents can mingle when they feel social.
- The checkups: every resident is weighed once a week, and any cat the volunteers are worried about is flagged for the vet’s weekly visit.
- The company: a program called Book Buddies invites people to come in and read aloud to the cats, which the charity says also helps nervous young readers build confidence.
- The funding: the original village was paid for by donations and sponsorship.
How many cats live there at any moment changes. Accounts that went viral in 2024 and 2025 put it at about 17, and at “20 or so.” By our arithmetic, the six chalets alone hold a maximum of 24 cats, before counting the mansion.
The euthanasia claim, checked
The trending headline frames the village as a rescue from being put to sleep. The charity’s own pages are more modest: they talk about lifelong sanctuary for vulnerable cats, not about pulling animals off death row. It is true more broadly that senior cats tend to wait longer for adoption than kittens do, which is the gap a place like this fills. But Badiyaa could not confirm that the Shrewsbury residents were specifically facing euthanasia, or who founded the charity, so we have left those details out.
Why the cottages need replacing
After well over a decade outdoors in the English weather, the original wooden cottages have been patched and repaired many times, and the charity says they now urgently need replacing. In a July appeal on its website, it asked businesses and individuals to sponsor six new purpose-built units with better insulation and easier cleaning.
Sponsorship tiers run from Bronze at £500 to Silver at £1,000 and Gold at £2,500, which buys exclusive naming rights on one cottage. If all six cottages found Gold sponsors, that would bring in £15,000. The new units are designed to be taken apart and moved, because the charity hopes eventually to relocate to a larger, purpose-built rescue center under a plan it calls the PURR Project.
The demand on the wider shelter is not small. Last year, the charity says, it took in 258 cats and 7 guinea pigs; 77 of the cats were strays or had been abandoned, and 40 were born on site.
“Replacing our cottages is essential to ensuring the welfare of the cats in our care,” said trustee Dianne Beaumont. Sponsors are promised an invitation to a reception at the rescue once the six new cottages are built.
Image: James Petts from London, England, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
Spot an error? Help verify this story
The story in 5 slides
