Plans to give Buxted a new 'heart'

Plans for a community hall in Buxted aim to give the village a new heart while providing a high quality contemporary building with meeting rooms, a pre-school and parish council office.

A planning application is before Wealden Council showing a detached, single-storey building providing three hall/meeting rooms of different sizes with associated kitchen and wc facilities and an office for the use of the clerk of the parish council.

A design and access statement says: “The aim is to create a high quality contemporary building that serves the community’s aspirations to establish a new “heart” to the village, provide a building that has a sensitive and meaningful relationship to its landscape setting and to ensure the proposals are inclusive and accessible.”

The hall would be built on land at the junction of Framfield Road and the High Street owned by the Basil Ionides Memorial Trust.*

The Basil Ionides Trust has already released neighbouring land for a new state of the art doctors’ surgery and, in so doing, provided an income stream which can be used to build the community hall.

Members of the community have come together to form The Heart of Buxted Initiative Group and taken over responsibility for the development of the hall from the parish council.

Existing village facilities offered at Reading Room are considered inadequate. That building dates back to 1908 and is “old, cold, draughty and small and not suitable for activities for the very young, elderly and the disabled”, says the design and access statement.

There are more than 30 local clubs and societies which would potentially use the new hall.

“Improved community facilities are vital to the sustainability of a community such as Buxted which has reached a size where without proactive initiatives to strengthen community bonds there is a tendency for it to lose the tight knit feel it once had as a small sustainable rural Sussex community and become more a dormitory for people who work in London, Crawley, Tunbridge Wells or Brighton.”

Plans for the new building show a main multi-purpose hall, lounge (meeting room), pre-school/small hall and parish council office/meeting accommodation.

The main hall and lounge would share access to a sheltered outdoor space with access beyond to the recreation field and the field in the southeast corner of the site. Both would also share access to a kitchen and work together as a theatrical performance space.

The Saplings pre-school is located at the entrance to the building so that access for pupils would be direct.

The Saplings Garden is walled for security and accessible only from the Saplings areas of the building. Folding screens would allow for school furniture and equipment to be easily stored at the end of the day, leaving the rest of the space available for community use out of school hours.

The parish council office would be generously proportioned to allow for meeting to take place there and the main circulation space within the building would be configured to allow for its use as a cafe.

“The walls are envisaged as a potential exhibition space for local art groups and artists, allowing for this sort of activity to become a year-round event in the building, independently of the main hall and lounge,” says the statement.

It concludes that the need for the building has been demonstrated through consultation in the village over the last five years and it is important that the parish hall takes its place at the heart of the community.

*Basil Ionides was an architect who lived at Buxted Park.