What sustains village life these days? Have our lives become so fragmented that they leave no room any more for the collective spirit  which, the good old day’s brigade never tires of reminding us, existed in days gone by?

Most of mid-Norfolk’s scattered settlements are small, yet in times past the chances are they were relatively self contained with a smithy, wheelwright, school, pub or two, shop, post office – maybe even their own railway station.

  Tiny Welborne, tucked away off the road to sprawling Mattishall, and with just 90-odd households and a few hundred inhabitants, would have had most of these things in the past (trains apart) but divested itself of them one by one through the 20th century.

  What it hasn’t lost in the process is its soul, thanks largely to the village committees who make things happen and to many other willing hands who pitch in when they do. If you cycled through Welborne on a typical day you’d probably find it was very quiet. But when the lights are switched on here and things get going, a focus is provided for the people who live here and a sense of community and a sense of identity are generated.

  Welborne’s flint faced village hall has served Welborne since it was built in 1845 by public subscription for the village poor. Step through the porch, with its ecclesiastical features borrowed from a much older building, and there’s the faintest hint of the schoolroom it once was, though the cosily painted wood-panelled walls and manorial fire place give it a less institutional feel.

  The hall was extended and modernised in 2006 and provides an ideal focus for village life.
Welborne’s artistic intentions are known widely. Its bi-annual festival, expanding from purely the visual arts to embrace music and literature, has demonstrated the village’s ability to box way above its weight on that score. The village also enjoys close ties with Creative Arts East, which brings music, dance, films and spoken word to various mid-Norfolk communities.

  That doesn’t mean that there’s no room for those staples of village halls: bring-and –buys, private parties, family gatherings and the like. If you want to run them, you’re welcome to hire the hall.
There is enormous goodwill to do things in Welborne and it must be emphasised that what is done is not about and never has been about, individual personalities. There are lots of people involved in many ways. Community spirit is all about inclusion – a feeling that you belong to a place no matter how small that dot on the map might be. The Welborne philosophy is that if the hall doesn’t exist and isn’t active, if the church doesn’t exist and isn’t active, the a place just becomes a conglomeration of houses where people happen to live. We believe in community here in Welborne.

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