A VILLAGE IN SUFFOLK with no pub, shop or community building will soon have a brand new village hall through a £187,218 bricks and mortar investment from the BIG Lottery Fund.

Bruisyard Parish Council is celebrating news of the award today, along with nine other communities across England who are sharing more than £2.5million from BIG’s Community Buildings programme.

Over the years, Bruisyard has lost its shop, its pub, and its village hall, and public transport services to the nearest small towns of Framlingham and Saxmundham, both over four miles away, are extremely limited. With several clubs and associations in the village in desperate need of a meeting place, the Parish Council formed a Village Hall Committee to put the wheels in motion, but it was clear that the amount of money to be raised was a big challenge for the small community.

“Bruisyard has been without a village hall or any other public meeting place for over 30 years,” said Peter Robinson, Chairman of Bruisyard Parish Council. “We used to have a meeting place which was known as the ‘Iron Room’, a Victorian Sunday School building of corrugated iron construction. It had no electricity, water or toilets, but is very fondly remembered by the older residents as the social heart of the community. Local dances were held, village events were celebrated and many couples met and held their wedding receptions there!

"Unfortunately the cost of repairing this building and for providing even the basic services such as electricity and water were prohibitively high for the village to find in the late 1960s and it had to be demolished after becoming structurally unsafe. But now the funding from the Big Lottery Fund will help us to recreate a very important community facility lost so many years ago.”

The new village hall will be built on the Parish Park in the centre of the village on land which was previously a waste ground for storing old farm machinery. This land has been transformed over the past ten years by the Parish Council into an attractive park and the village hall will complete the transformation for the park to become the social hub of the community.

David Smith, Secretary of Bruisyard Village Hall said: “The award by the Big Lottery Fund is tremendous news and a huge step forward in realising our plans for building a village hall. Our plan is for the hall to be completed by the autumn of next year so that clubs and self-help groups like the children’s activity club, youth club, senior citizen’s lunch club, exercise classes, and computing/IT classes can start using it. The hall will benefit over 200 people and will help address the problems of social isolation which can be particularly acute for the young and elderly in our isolated rural community.”

A key requirement of the design of the new hall was that it should be environmentally sustainable and have minimal running costs. Architect and Bruisyard local, Mr Robert Smith, has designed the new energy efficient hall in the style of a traditional Suffolk barn, to be built from local materials wherever possible.

Sara Betsworth, Big Lottery Fund Head of Region for East of England said: “The new village hall in Bruisyard will be a truly fantastic asset to the local community. In a village where there is no other public building, the hall will be essential in fostering greater social interaction and maintaining a strong sense of community. We’re delighted to be supporting this project.”

Further information

Big Lottery Fund Press Office: 020 7211 1888
Out of hours contact: 07867 500 572
Public Enquiries Line: 08454 102 030
Textphone:  0845 6021 659
Full details of the Big Lottery Fund programmes and grant awards are available on the website at www.biglotteryfund.org.uk.

Notes to Editors

• Community Buildings is dedicated to investing in buildings that give communities a chance to improve their quality of life and meet local needs, by offering a range of activities and services open to a broad range of people.
• £50 million will be distributed across England over three years with grants of £50,000 to £500,000 available.
• The programme opened for applications in June 2006. 200 applicants were invited to submit stage 2 applications and development funding was awarded to some projects.
• The programme is now closed for applications.  
• The Big Lottery Fund rolls out close to £2 million in Lottery good cause money every 24 hours which together with other Lottery distributors means that across the UK most people are within a few miles of a Lottery-funded project.
• The Big Lottery Fund, the largest of the National Lottery good cause distributors, has been rolling out grants to health, education, environment and charitable causes across the UK since its inception in June 2004. It was established by Parliament on 1 December 2006.
• Since the National Lottery began in 1994, 28p from every pound spent by the public has gone to Good Causes. As a result, over £20 billion has now been raised and more than 280,000 grants given out across the arts, sport, heritage, charities, health, education and the environment.