A row of karate kids are performing mawashi geri kicks in unison to the cries of their teacher. Coincidentally, in the room next door, the Brownies are learning first aid. The next morning, a gaggle of pensioners arrive and are soon waltzing to wartime classics. Then, by the afternoon, a jumble sale is in full swing. One week later, dozens of people are queuing up to vote, hot on the heels of a neighbourhood forum discussing a contentious planning application.
These are just a few moments in the life of a humble village hall. More than any other building type, the village hall represents the ultimate multifunctional democratic space. It is a forum for raffles, cake sales, birthday parties, fitness classes, political meetings and more – a witness, as Jethro Marshall puts it, “to great human events – mostly for around £8 per hour”.
Marshall, a Dorset-based art director and photographer, has surveyed a range of village halls across the West Country for his latest book, Halls & Oats, a celebration of what he calls “utilitarian bucolic construction”. In the midst of the pandemic, his carefully framed black and white images, devoid of human life, take on a new level of pathos. The children’s parties have stopped, the Bums and Tums classes are postponed, Knit and Natter has been put on hold. Absent of the life that sustains them, village halls have become empty shells of promise, haunting symbols of a time when we could congregate – but also hopeful reminders that we might one day do so again.
For all the colourful life they contain, these buildings tend to be fairly nondescript, if not downright bleak. As architect Sam Jacob writes in the introduction: “They are vernacular in a practical rather than sentimental way.” While town halls are draped in the heraldry of civic power, and churches are intent on impressing narrative and belief, the village hall is “determinedly mundane in its dogged lack of architectural expression”. Part barn, part chapel, part schoolhouse, they are, for want of a better word, sheds – but sheds full of civic ambition.
The Bettiscombe village hall, built in 1961, is a stained timber building with a simple pitched roof, elevated by the addition of a big porch and central square window. It has the look of an Amish barn or a pioneer church, the rituals of worship exchanged for bingo and Pudding and Pie nights. Branoc Hall in Branscome, built in 1976, is a grander affair, with two storeys of windows and exposed ragstone walls lending it a weighty air. A central clock on the gable end cements its status as a force for public good. St Andrews community hall, built in Charmouth in 1909, cranks the ambition up even further, with pebbledashed buttresses and a frontage clad with mock-Tudor timbers, giving the indoor lawn bowls sessions a whiff of Merrie Olde England.
Others are more straightforward prefabs. Knowle village hall was built in 1948 by the National Council of Social Services as a temporary measure and, like many temporary postwar structures, is still going strong 70 years on. In the Exmouth Journal’s report on its opening, a Mr Tilestone described how “the hall was not a building erected for any one section of the community. It was not for the men, the women, the small children, or the old people but it was for every single one of them – it belonged to the village as a whole.” As Jacob puts it, in their very existence, village halls are “a covenant – a promise even – of the possibility of community that must be fulfilled”. With many taking on a new life as hubs for aid networks in the pandemic, they continue to operate as radical spaces of social connection.
This is Marshall’s fifth book, under the imprint West Country Modern, following such titles as Farm Follows Function, Coastal Brutalism and This is Hardcore, the last a photographic essay of roads. The subjects seem wilfully mundane. They take the matter-of-fact aesthetic of the “new topographics” school of American photography – pioneered in the 1970s by Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher – and apply it to the most humdrum of structures in the Devon and Dorset countryside.
By doing so, Marshall forces us to look again, to see the beauty in barns and the majesty of flyovers. He says his intention is to “reframe our rural landscapes as inspiring, progressive environments” and sums up his position as “anti bucolic/pro rural”. The countryside is not a rose-tinted Eden, as hundreds of years of romantic propaganda would have us believe, but a place of work, industry and civic life. Activities may be on hold for now, but socially distanced coffee mornings and contactless karate will return soon enough.
• Halls & Oats by Jethro Marshall is available now from West Country Modern.
