The village or parish hall might not be as old as you think it is. Sometimes in my researches, two things coincide, causing a realisation. This two-pronged realisation about the village hall happened to me earlier this year. First of all, while drafting a blog post for The History Usherette, I wanted to know whatever had become of the village squire. It turns out that this position, high in the feudal hierarchy, had plummeted during the inter-war years. All those big houses that were sold off, closed up or knocked down in the 1920s and 1930s were victims of a combination of after effects of war – the loss of the male heirs and the crippling death duties that tried to claw back some of the financial cost. This did for much of the small time local aristocracy that ran rural England. And the rural population, now exposed to cinemas, radios and motor vehicles were less inclined to take much notice of them as they faded away. There’s a lot of evidence of this in my local area – I once
Celebrating the Village and Parish Halls of Middle England