my local village hall

[chaz]

more of a question to @moonraker 

when I was a teenager my village hall held a few surprises, a few of my firsts,,,but thats another story. 

the village hall was a corrugated tin roofed article seemed of an age that always needed TLC. Ive recently read up on the village web pages.

The current Village Hall was originally built as a World War 1 temporary field hospital on Salisbury Plain. It was relocated to Christian Malford in the 1920s on land donated by Thornend Farm.

 

It is owned by the trustees of the Village Hall and run by a committee, some of whom are also trustees. It is their responsibility to ensure that there is a Village Hall for future generations. There have been concerns for some time over the long-term structural condition of the Hall and the trustees have been assessing the options for the future. The building needs to be updated to cope with the demands of the many clubs and associations that use it.

 

as the hall is of a certain age, would there be any idea of where it was originally situated on the Plain being a hospital. ?

Also , before it gets pulled down ( a possibility in the future) is there any historic interest?

 

 

 

[Moonraker]

Interesting post, Chaz. I'm aware of a number of Wiltshire WWI huts being moved and re-used. Some were bought by nearby communities and used as village halls, but I can't make any suggestions as to where Christian Malford's may have come from. The nearest  military establishments were Chisledon Camp and RAF Yatesbury, but proximity is not necessarily a clue -  Liverpool Council bought 500 army huts from Lark Hill Camp for conversion into family houses, each comprising a living room, three bedrooms and scullery. And referring to a "field hospital" may not be completely accurate.  Most military bases had their own medical huts and many had large hospitals - at Chisledon there was one for VD patients,

Re-purposing as a community hall would have been an initiative by local people, but  disposal sales were advertised in the local and national press and the Ministry of Munitions magazine Surplus. In mid-June 1919 building materials at RAF bases at Stonehenge, Upavon and Yatesbury were on offer. The September 15, 1919 Surplus offered 46 Armstrong huts, a 48 x 32ft canteen formed of four Armstrong huts, corrugated iron buildings, ablution sheds, sentry boxes, barbed wire and boilers.

Very early in the war, there were complaints about shoddy materials and poor workmanship relating to the army huts being hastily built, but perhaps standards had improved when it came to erecting the one that ended up at Christian Malford. A century of use is very good.

About 20 years ago,  there was concern about the future of a hut from Sutton Mandeville Camp, west of Salisbury, and talk about its preservation, but I don't known what the outcome was.