July | August 2024 Newsletter

Hello everyone, my name is Conor and I am the new Chair of Norton and Cuckney Village Hall Trustees. For those of you who don’t know me, I’ve lived on the Welbeck Estate most of my life and my family have been proud to be involved with the area for many generations. I became a Parish Councillor last year and I’ve always seen the Village Hall as an important building in our community.

I would like to thank everyone who has been involved with the Village Hall over the years, as it is thanks to your tireless efforts that I have so many happy memories associated with the building.

In recent years there have been plans to move the Village Hall to a new location, along with building a community car park. With rising costs and limited funding, this project is still many years away. In the meantime, the current village hall has struggled, losing its heating system along with regular bookings, as well as with other issues. 

This has been a contentious issue for some time, but if a new Village Hall is not feasible and the current one is left to fall into disrepair, nobody wins.

However, the Parish Council, led by Nancy Wright, realised something must be done. We, as a Council, want to make our Parish the best place to live and the permanent closure of the Village Hall would be a huge loss.

A new group of trustees have met several times and we now have a closer tie to the Parish Council, who are Corporate Trustees. We all have different backgrounds and interests, but we all care very deeply about the future of the village hall.

We initially have one goal and one goal only: 

Keep the current Norton and Cuckney Village Hall open.

So, what do we plan to do? Well, we’ve already started. I cannot thank Gemma Palmer enough for her outstanding fundraising efforts! The Yorkshire Three Peaks are formidable, but Gemma smashed both her target time and her fundraising goal. We’ve already had two successful days giving the hall some much needed TLC and I’d like to thank everyone for their efforts so far.

The D-Day event also raised over £200 for the Village Hall, with most of the fundraising on the day, quite rightly, being donated to the Royal British Legion. The building will also be used once again as a polling station in the upcoming election.

You probably can’t miss it (given the garish pink flyer), but we are running a quiz night which will be a fantastic opportunity for us all to come together. I hope it will be an enjoyable event for all and a fun competition. We are also planning other events, some returning favourites and new ones, so there will be something for everyone, which is exactly what the Village Hall should be!

That’s what we are trying to achieve. To have a space for the community to use, whether it’s somewhere for local groups to meet, a special event, a party or anything else in between. We want the hall to reflect the community it serves.

However, until this point, we have been a very small group, thinking of ideas, looking for solutions, volunteering our time and effort towards restoring a community asset that we hope everyone would like to see back up and running to its former standards. I would now like to encourage everyone to get involved, as the Village Hall should be shaped by the demands of the people who use it.

Even if it is something as simple as sharing an idea, attending the events, donating a raffle or quiz prize, or volunteering your own time, we want to involve you in this project. Whether you are reading this in the Parish Newsletter that was posted through your door or on our Facebook page, you are a member of the community, and it will ultimately be the community  who decide if this project is viable.

Let’s make the Village Hall a welcoming, positive and friendly place to be, just like the Parish it is located in.

Conor Marples, Chair, Norton and Cuckney Village Hall