General Meeting – There was a useful discussion at our open meeting on 16th February about what the community needs in our village hall in the future. We now have a comprehensive list that will form the basis of our future plans to renovate the hall and develop its facilities to meet your needs.
The trustees, like everyone else, would love to be able to knock down the current building and start again with a new hall. However, we have had to come to terms with reality. A new-build project would mean raising over £750,000 which, in more favourable financial times, has taken similar projects 10+ years to complete. The National Lottery have made it clear that at present “it is quite rare to fund capital projects over £100,000”. In addition, as with all large-scale funders, they demand high design standards, technical assessments, planning approvals and building controls for major building works, so there is no ‘quick fix’ solution.
Given this situation, the trustees believe it best to completely renovate the current building for the following reasons.
- It is a sound post-war ex-Department of Works building of known specification.
- Work can be carried out in phases, starting with the roof followed by ground works and insulation of the walls and then internal workings according to your priorities.
- Each phase of improvements can be carried out as funds become available, making those improvements available in a shorter timeframe.
- On completion, the renovated building will look and feel like a new building – like Swimbridge’s village hall renovation.
We have appointed an architect to lead us through the initial stages of our project and to develop a draft design for the renovated hall. This design will be available for you to view and comment on at an Open Day in the village hall on Saturday April 22nd (details to follow) The results of this consultation will go forward for planning and then building controls approvals.
All being well, we hope to be in a position by October to be ready to start construction work for the first phase assuming we have the funding to do so! Funding will be our biggest constraint for this and all subsequent phases.
What can you, the community, do to help?
Big funders, like the National Lottery, will only approved large scale grants if they are convinced that the community as a whole both needs what it is proposing and actively supports it. The trustees are on your side working hard to make our village hall into a vibrant community hub available to everyone in the community. To make it happen, we need you to be on our side as well by showing support in the surveys that we will be delivering, commenting on social media, liking us on Facebook, using the hall more and coming along to our fundraising events. It will need all of us working together towards that common goal. Thank you in anticipation of your support.
Chittlehampton Village Hall Trustees
