Beacons of hope and action – a tribute to the humble village hall
OPINION
I can’t recall a time when an event at a village hall wasn’t on the calendar. Humble, functional buildings, village halls are beacons of hope and action, ‘owned’ and run by their community, for their community.
When you think about it, it’s a beautiful, radical idea. And a rural one, at that. But I wonder, is it something others associate with fading use and a nostalgia for a bucolic past? Not if me or my village can help it.
From preparing for invasions during the Second World War to harvest suppers, WI meetings and jumble sales, playgroups, farmers’ markets and yoga, 8th, 18th or 80th birthday parties, barn dances, fundraisers and parish council meetings, all the way through to weddings, wakes and lectures, the capability of village halls is inexhaustible. Cheap to hire, with a kitchen, serving hatch and sometimes a stage, the 10,000 village halls in Britain are a remarkably progressive institution.
Ours is 100 years old, and rather lovely. Purpose-built in a simple 1920s modernist style, it has a polished wooden floor, wonderful rafters and is currently surrounded by fields of spring lambs. It might surprise people that most village halls will celebrate their centenary this decade.
The aftermath of the First World War threatened to decimate low-populated, isolated rural communities more than most, with much of an entire generation lost and country estates broken up. Women weren’t welcome in pubs and often had children to care for.
The newly created National Council of Social Service set up a Village Halls Department and communities rallied behind a desire to provide lasting memorials to those young men in buildings of purpose: ones that were forward-looking and provided recreation as much as support, self-governance and education, in a dream of social cohesion and wellbeing.
Newly redundant military huts were co-opted, while others like ours were built by landowners. Most were completed between 1919 and 1929, and came into their own in the Second World War, as the base for a rural Home Guard, gas mask distribution, communal jam or rosehip-syrup making and, behind blackout curtains, defiant dancing.
Wherever I’ve lived, we’ve frequented the vi
