The hall has an interesting if short history. The story begins in 1945 ....

On the thirtieth of July of that year, Mrs Marian Buck of ‘The Noverings’, Bosbury gifted one of her properties, The Old Vicarage, which had been used as the Parish Hall Club Rooms to trustees to hold in a charitable trust “for the purposes of physical and mental training and recreation and social moral and intellectual development through the medium of reading and recreation rooms, library, lectures, classes, recreations and entertainments or otherwise as may be found expedient for the benefit of the inhabitants of the Parish of Bosbury in the County of Hereford and its immediate vicinity without distinction of sex or of political, religious or other opinions subject to the provisions of these presents.”

The Parish Rooms

She had bought the property in 1911 from Willoughby Baskerville Mynors of Bosbury House. It was the parish vicarage until the building of a new vicarage, now “Great Gables”. The trustees to whom she conveyed the property and land were Janet Margaret Beith, her secretary and companion at Noverings and Charles Briscoe Masefield, a local solicitor from Ledbury. When the property was registered as a charity, the trustees passed control on to a Committee of Management which was made up of representatives of organisations within Bosbury who were users of the Parish Rooms.

Mrs Buck was a remarkable woman. This is a portrait of her as a young woman. It is kept at ‘The Noverings’ and reproduced by kind permission of Peter and Heather Clark.

She was born, Marian Walker, in Leicester in 1851 and, when she was young, she stayed at Stanley Hill in Bosbury. She later returned to the area and together with Misses Anna Brander and Mary Worthington, founded a girl’s “Residential School for Household Training” at Evendine Court in the nearby village of Colwall. She owned land and a number of properties in the area including ‘The Noverings’ which was her final home. She left land to the Church to extend the churchyard and erect a war memorial and also a sexton’s cottage.

The Parish Rooms in the Old Vicarage continued up to the 1960’s but the buildings had deteriorated badly and it was decided after public consultation to demolish the main building and rebuild completely. The new hall was opened on 15th June 1968 and since then a number of facilities have been added. In 1996 a tennis court and bowling green were built and in 1998 an extension for retail premises was added at the front and the Hall itself extended with a stage area. A Sports Hall was added at the rear.

The Hall settled into a new routine until towards year 2000 the need for a complete refurbishment of the Hall was identified. The late Mr Thomas Hone of Bosbury left a property, The Cottage, to the Parish Hall Trustees in his will as accommodation for the Hall caretaker but it was agreed that it be sold and the interest on the invested proceeds be used to pay for a caretaker’s services.

A lot of hard work from the trustees and the people of Bosbury led to a feasability study being prepared in August 2004 and, after Planning Permission was granted in October 2005, the construction work began in January 2007. A new entrance at the side of the Hall was built, the flat roof over the retail premises was fitted with a pitched roof and a fully-equipped toilet for the disabled added. The gravel car park was replaced with tarmacadam and new kerbing and surface water drainage installed.

The Parish Hall today

In Phase II in 2009, the kitchen has been completely revamped in line with modern catering standards, the toilet area fittings and heating and lighting equipment has been replaced and the entire hall rewired and redecorated.

Phase III shortly after will take the facilities a step forward with, among other things, improvements to stage sound and lighting facilities, new curtaining and blinds, replacing hall maintenance equipment and extra cupboard space.

If you are interested here is the document which forms our constitution. To view this you need to have the Adobe PDF viewer installed and you can download the free viewer here.