I have foolishly permanently deleted the original Home page from my predominantly static page website. I now realise I need a page of posts as a "News" page and I should have modified the original Home page to achieve this.
Can I recreate this page or do I have to start again with a new installation?

I don't know what you mean by you "permanently" deleted the "original" home page. Can you post a link to your site?

I trashed the original "Hello world!" Home page then clicked on "delete permanently" in the Trash list.

The site is www.wordpress.johnedgartrust.org.uk/

All I'm trying to do is to create a page of posts. At a later stage I would like to create a second one with access restricted to "members"

Any help will be much appreciated!

That is basic WordPress functionality. Look in Settings>Reading

Thank you. I had set a static page in Settings>Reading but hadn't appreciated the significance of the Posts Page box and thought my impetuous deleting was the problem!