History

The hall was built as a soup kitchen in Victorian times and later acquired by the Church of Scotland, when it became known as the Church Hall or the Mission Hall. Up to the late 1970s it was used along with the much larger Volunteer Hall in what is now the Old Town. The Volunteer Hall was sold and demolished to make way for new housing in the 1970s.

At the same time, the new Ayton Primary School was built which included a large hall to be used as a community hall. The school hall was used well for 20 years or so but greatly increased hire charges have meant it is rarely used by the community now.

The hall was always cold and difficult to heat in the winter. It had absolutely no insulation whatsoever. Originally it had gas lighting and had two open fires in the main hall as the only source of heating. There was another fireplace in the back room, which later became the library and second hand bookshop.

We aren’t exactly sure when the hall was built. When we were looking at the outside bricks prior to the refurbishment work we found a brick on the south side of the hall. It is engraved Robert Cockburn, Lint Hill, Eyemouth. Unfortunately there’s no date on it. We know from that that the bricks used to build the original came from the tile and brickworks at Linthill on the back road to Eyemouth. We investigated further after finding this but could find no local records for Robert Cockburn.

The Church was finding the upkeep of the hall quite difficult and planned to sell it at some point. A group of local villagers became aware of this and decided that, if possible, it should be purchased and upgraded to benefit the whole community.

A village meeting was called in February 2005 and at that meeting Ayton Community Hall Association (ACHA) was formed. A committee of villagers took on the job of organising the Association, with the long term task of creating a ‘small but modern centrally situated hall’. The Church agreed to sell the hall to the Association for a nominal £100, but it took around three years to sort out various legal and ownership matters before the hall finally became the property of the Association. In those three years the Association became a Scottish Charity (SC 037032) and set about thinking how best to develop the hall as well as embarking on a fund raising programme.

The first ideas for the hall involved building a larger one on ground at the rear and incorporating the existing building, but after an application from the Lottery Fund was rejected it was decided it would be more realistic to modernise the building within the existing walls and this is indeed what happened.

In May 2013 the Association was granted SCIO status by OSCR, the Scottish Charities Register. SCIO stands for Scottish Charitable Incorporated Corporation. We are now known as Ayton Community Hall Association SCIO. Under this system the Association has members and it is from this membership that a number of Trustees are elected annually to run the hall. Under the rules set out in the constitution there can be between 4 and 11 Trustees.

A second hand bookshop operated from 2006 to 2009 by ACHA, raising nearly £2000 to help the hall refurbishment. It was open on Saturday mornings and was well supported for a while. The area where the bookshop was in the old back of the hall is where the new kitchen is. In times past this small room was the Berwickshire county library branch in the village. It was always damp!