Ansty Platoon of the Home Guard, thought to be taken outside village hall in1943

By Bradbury Williams

With exactly a century of service behind it, the old Ansty Village Hall is coming to the end of its unique innings at the heart of a thriving Mid-Sussex community. The official grand opening back in January 1921 was largely managed by the new Women’s Institute, one of the first in the country.

They ensured the new hall was equipped to a good standard, fully furnished, with oil lamps, a coke stove and curtains made by their members. But in just a few months time the historic old hall will finally be demolished to make way for the new £1.25M Ansty Village Centre.

“There’s no doubt it’s the end of an era,” said Maureen Gibson, of the Ansty Village Hall Trust. “I can’t count all the village fetes, cream teas and Christmas parties…there’s been a lot of happy memories and a lot of village history.”

For the last 100 years the hall has been a community centre and home to a social club and a highly successful cricket club, that’s grown ever stronger over the decades.

Before reaching Ansty the beloved hall had an earlier role in the First World War. It is thought to have provided troop accommodation for the Canadian Expeditionary Force on the Western Front in France. In August 1920, the Ansty Village Hall Committee had bought some land from the Sergison Estate for £20, but it had decided it couldn’t meet the estimated £542 for a new brick building.

Within months they found a solution, having jumped at the opportunity to buy an army surplus hut. It would arrive by train at Haywards Heath station as a flat pack, at a cost of just £250. During the interwar years, Ansty continued to grow with lots of new housing between the long established country homes. It had the relatively new St. John’s Chapel just next to the village hall, built in 1905 on the site of an old mission house. Also there was a village shop, a post office, a market garden, a blacksmith and a forge, now a Shell garage, plus a very well used pub, called The Green Cross, later the Anstye Cross.

Read more about the history of Ansty Village hall, including multiple sporting clubs, churches, and more in Feb’s issue of Cuckfield Life.