A village raised the money for this building in four years of raffles, a legacy, and one substantial anonymous cheque that arrived with a note asking for a fireplace. There is a fireplace.
The whole project is one room, five metres by twelve, and the section is the only drawing that explains it. The floor sits six hundred millimetres below the entrance level, which buys a double-height volume without a taller building — an important point in a conservation area where the planning argument was won on ridge height and nothing else.
North light, and only north light
There are no windows on the south elevation. Reading rooms with south glazing spend their lives behind blinds, and a blind is a building admitting it got the orientation wrong. The light comes from a clerestory running the full length of the north side, at a height that puts the sky in the room and keeps the neighbouring rooftops out of it.
On a bright day in June the illuminance at the far table is enough to read by without any electric light at all. On a grey January afternoon it is not, and there are lamps, and that is a reasonable division of labour.
What the previous hall left behind
The 1908 hall that stood here was beyond repair, but its floor was Baltic pine of a density that cannot now be bought. It was lifted board by board, de-nailed, thicknessed and relaid. Roughly one board in five did not survive the process. The replacements are new Douglas fir, left obviously new, running in a band along the north wall where the clerestory catches them.
We were asked whether the new boards could be stained to match. They could. Ask again in forty years, when the answer will have changed by itself.
The plinth is board-marked concrete, cast in situ against boards reused from the site hoarding, so the grain in the finished building is a record of the fence that surrounded it while it was being built.