Farley, Wiltshire

A twinge of nostalgia

Making a trip to Salisbury the other day, I decided to divert and look at the church at Farley, a rather beautiful bit of rural classicism that I hope to share with you soon. I seem to remember reading an account of it somewhere that praised the church while decrying the ‘ugly village hall’ next door. When I got there, this is what I found.

Ugly? Well, it’s hardly rural classicism, but as a lover of corrugated iron I found something to admire in the simplicity of this structure, which has clearly been serving the local community for many decades. It looks like something a bit more, too, than the standard off-the-shelf corrugated-iron building from one of the many manufacturers that allowed you to order up a church, village hall, or isolation hospital from a catalogue and have it delivered to you local railway station as a kit of parts. The curvy bargeboard is a nice ‘extra’, while the window at the front, which looks as if it wants the angled portions to be glazed but instead opts for more wriggly tin, is an eccentric touch.

There used to be a hall rather like this a couple of villages along the road from where I live. It didn’t have quite the same pattern to the bargeboards, and it certainly didn’t boast such an unusual front window, but the shade of faded green was exactly the same, and the paintwork was peeling in a similar way. It has gone now, and I looked at the one at Farley with just a twinge of nostalgia.