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Hagbourne Village Hall

Newsletter November 2009
The Committee has decided to publish a Newsletter to apprise the Hall's users, the two villages' Parish Councils, and the villages' communities of the major work planned at the Hall.

For some time we have been aware that the size of the Hall is inadequate when the Preschool organisation is in session and other features of the Hall, namely the entrance lobby and lavatories, are less than salubrious. Further, the current layout which incorporates the disabled persons' lavatory within the Ladies' lavatories is entirely unsatisfactory, and we are always short of storage space. Users have been polled to find out their preferences for improvement and after a considerable while we have settled on the design for an extension which addresses these concerns.

One of our major problems is the severe lack of space available to us on which we might build. The original Hall had a very small "footprint" which was increased circa 1952 by the purchase of an extra piece of land which became the Hall's car park and is now the courtyard within the wooden fence. Part of that land was built on in 1988 to create what is now known as the Small Hall. The Hall owns a strip of land on its east side bordering the ex-council houses, but the maximum width of this is only 2.5 metres or so. Also the Hall owns a narrow piece of land which abuts the footpath leading from Harwood Road to the new pedestrian crossing, but neither of these pieces of land is suitable for the size of extension we need.

We considered the two remaining options, namely to extend westwards or northwards, and have settled on the latter for the following reasons:
- any northward extension is more compact than an eastward one,
- it fills in the area between the current Ladies' lavatories and the current NW corner of the building,
- it creates the larger lobby we need,
- an eastward extension would effectively cut off the portion of the courtyard nearest the road and render it difficult to access and therefore diminish its usefulness severely.

Having thought about our needs for some considerable time we have decided to create a larger lobby which will enable pre-school's parents to wait for their children in greater comfort, move the disabled persons' lavatory out of the Ladies' room, create a small meeting room and two storage rooms. The meeting room should be more convenient for Parish Council use than the current arrangements and we hope to attract other similar activities; maybe someone will start a bridge club? Cost has naturally been a consideration and, whilst the Hall has been prudently saving money for some years towards this project, we shall be applying to various grant-awarding authorities for additional finance. Both Parish Councils have kindly considered our situation and with all these sources of funds we fully expect the whole project to be within our financial means. To ensure we obtain value for money we are inviting competitive tenders for the work and will take up references so that we may be as certain as possible that contractors will deliver the goods reliably and on time.

Click here to see the proposed new floor-plan.

Village hall contact details can be found by clicking here