The start of 2008 saw work well underway on the new Village Hall. During January the scaffolding came down, as detailed in the update in the February Magazine
Progress continued well during winter and into spring, as reported in the March 2008 newsletter.
The Village Hall AGM also reported good progress
The new facility was officially opened with many notable features on 16th July 2008. Dorothy Howells and Harry Baragwanath cut the ribbon at the opening ceremony.
The design of the new Hall is deliberately reminiscent of the Reading Room that formerly stood on the same site to blend into the village landscape. The new Hall boasts an extremely low carbon footprint. High standards of energy conservation and innovative features such as under floor heating by ground-sourced heat pump, sun tubes to maximise natural light, rainwater harvesting and low energy electrics also feature in the design. These ensure that the new Hall, although double the size of the former Reading Room and with much better facilities, uses less power and is much more environmentally friendly than the old Victorian building.
The green credentials are further enhanced by re-using on the new building hand-made roof tiles salvaged by villagers from the Reading Room. Villagers also saved and cleaned hundreds of hand-made bricks from the Reading Room for sale and re-use, proceeds going towards the cost of the new Hall.
The Village Hall was built by local contractor Bilton Design and Build. It cost around £400,000 this was funded thanks to grants from a number of organisations. The Rugby Cement Benevolent Fund, Rugby Borough Council, and the Garfield Weston Foundation contributed generously as did the Church Lawford School Houses Charity and the Sir Edward Boughton Long Lawford Charity. Substantial awards under the Landfill Communities Fund have been made by Biffaward, Veolia Environmental Trust, Waste Recycling Group (administered by Environmental Body WREN) and Lafarge Aggregates (administered by the Warwickshire Environmental Trust).
Despite the generosity of the funders the Village Hall Committee were still a few thousands short of the total needed to fund all the works, by the time the final costs were known, so items such as internal decoration and landscaping the grounds were completed by groups of volunteers.