Village Halls are the Heart of a Community!

This week is village halls week and Action Hampshire are using this week to advocate for these fantastic spaces, alongside all the other amazing organisations including ACRE, who are shouting from the rooftops about how vital these spaces are for rural communities.

Preparing for a big campaign week in the comms department means we spend time thinking about different angles and what elements of the topic we can champion. This got me thinking about my experiences of rural life and the village halls supporting small communities. The more I thought, or spoke out loud to my ever patient colleagues, I realised a lot of my favourite childhood memories are all based in a community building. My village hall, in the little village I grew up in, is the hub of the area. It’s the place we all went. Its where everything and anything was held.

If it didn’t happen at the village hall, it didn’t happen in our area.

That sounds drastic but really, rural life is that simple in some ways. If there isn’t a space, there isn’t any other options.

To this day, the village nursery school my mother ran for 15 years and myself and all my classmates attended still operates inside the very same hall. The local Scout and Guiding packs still meet there weekly, ever since their traditional timber scout hut became unsuitable in the early 2000s. The village luncheon club, a club for elderly members of the community to meet and share a meal still meet and cook in the halls well equipped kitchen and currently the Panto (Cinderella this year!) is being held on the stage every night for the next week.

I have fond memories of so many events held in the hall during my childhood.

I remember being given 20p by my mother to spend at the toy stall at the regular village jumble sales and winning first place in the Horticultural society summer show for my attempt to grow cress in a conch shell. I learnt how to use chop sticks in the hall, during an evening event with a wonderful Korean lady on a work exchange programme in the area. I saw in the new millennium surrounded by the local community in that space, dancing with friends to Terrys DJ’ing (DJ by night, local coal man by day!). When I begged my mother for a sleep over party for my birthday as a young teen, not understanding our tiny house was definitely not big enough, my mother booked the side room adjacent to the hall. We spent the day decorating it with fairy lights, pillows and blankets. We planned games and bought every snack a teenager would want for a midnight feast. My friends raved about it for years!

As an adult I voted in my first election at that very hall, as without it there is no suitable space for a polling station for miles. I attended Pilates classes, worked as a waitress for events and attended the ever popular cinema every month, seeing familiar faces and eating little tubs of ice cream with a wooden scoop. I’ve attended AGMs, planning meetings and watched creative friends get their businesses off the ground by selling to the local community in the regular craft fair. When snow and bad weather hits the community everyone knows to go to the hall; the ‘emergency mobile’ is turned on and people are bought to the space to ride it out in the warm safety of the community space. Able members of the village meet and are sent off on errands around the area, fetching and delivering items for vulnerable residents. I have very fond memories of delivering milk to elderly friends and residents during blizzards and being offered a ‘hot toddy’ for my trouble.

Moving from the village to a city meant I no longer instantly looked for the local hall to find what is going on. There is somewhere for everything in a large town or city. There are sports halls, events spaces and back rooms of pubs to host events in. In a larger area the offering is wider, but in a rural area, this hall is everything. It’s the one space, often the only space, where everything and anything happens. Without this space, the people who dedicate their time to them and local fundraising efforts, small rural communities lose a valuable asset. When getting married in 2021, my husband and I agreed instantly that our reception should be in the local village hall. It was a perfect space and the hire costs go straight back in to the upkeep of the beautiful building!

I shall end my wistful trip down rural memory lane on one final thought. The campaign this year is focussing on these spaces being ‘warm, welcoming and inclusive spaces’ and I hope you all agree that this is a perfect way to describe a village hall. They are there, for everyone, for everything.

There are over 10,000 Community Buildings across the country, with 224 of those in Hampshire! Rural communities rely on these for socialising, and just about everything else! We at Action Hampshire hope you'll show some love for your local halls this Village Halls Week.

You can listen to Jenny's feature on BBC Radio Solent's show with Pat Sissons below!