The Village Halls Podcast
A podcast for anyone involved in the running of Britain's 10,000 village, church and community and anyone interested in the vital community services they provide.
The Village Halls Podcast
Connecting the Disconnected: Village Hall Internet Options Explained
We dive into the practical world of internet connectivity for village halls, exploring everything from 4G to Starlink, fiber to copper, sharing real-world experiences to help you make the best choice for your community space.
• Internet is now classified as a human right, yet many rural communities still struggle with speeds below 0.5 Mbps
• Community-led solutions like Hebnet CIC have successfully provided internet coverage across 600 square miles of Scotland's Highlands and Islands
• Starlink offers viable speeds but at a significant cost (approximately £75/month), making it suitable only where no alternatives exist
• 4G can provide excellent performance in low-population areas but may struggle during peak usage periods
• Village halls should aim for minimum 50 Mbps connections when planning to stream live events
• Hardwired access points are superior to mesh networks for reliable coverage throughout larger buildings
• Multiple WiFi networks from a single access point can separate secure payment systems from general public use
• Outdated routers can significantly limit connection speed regardless of your internet package
Hi, I'm Marc Smith and welcome to the Village Halls podcast, sponsored by Allied Westminster, the UK's largest specialist provider of Village Hall insurance, and the home of Village Guard. Before we begin, a quick reminder that entries are now open for the Village Halls Inspiration Awards 2025, celebrating the incredible work happening in village, community and church halls across the country. You can apply between the 1st of May and the 30th of September, so do consider putting your hall forward. Welcome to the Village Halls podcast. In this episode, we're going to dive into the world of internet connectivity for Village Halls. If you've heard me talk about my fibre work in the community, you might think we're just repeating ourselves, but this time it's a little bit different, because today we're focusing on the practicalities. So what internet options are actually available for village halls and, crucially, how you can get your hall connected? So, from 4G to Starlink and existing fibre to copper, we will break down the pros and cons and share real-world experiences to help you make the best choice. So, to complement this episode, I'm also putting together a handy how-to guide for our website, inspired by what I'll be doing right after editing this podcast heading down to my own village hall to set up their Wi-Fi. I'll be tackling those dead zones and making sure everyone can get connected. So I should mention too that we're not just talking in theory here. Our work with Hebnet, cic and other local initiatives has covered a staggering 600 square miles of the Highlands and Islands, so we know a thing or two about finding solutions that really work for rural communities.
Marc Smith:Joining me for this conversation is Ian Bolas, co-director of Hebnet CIC. Ian's knowledge of rural internet options far surpasses anyone else I know, making him the perfect guest for this episode. So let's get into it. Welcome to the podcast, ian. Thanks for having me, Marc, no worries. Well, I think it's best to be up front as well. We are actually co-directors two of four of the CIC Hebnet, two or four of the CIC Hebnet and we provide, I suppose, the internet to quite a large area up here in the west coast of Scotland. But I came in quite late to Hebnet because you were using the village I live in as a kind of hop to another island. So be really good if you can tell us a little bit why, like when Hebnet was created and why it was created.
Ian Bolas:Right, yeah, so Hebnet was created in I think it was 2011,. The actual business was formed, I think we trialled stuff in 2010. And it was basically because the small aisles where we started there was just no internet really for anyone there other than satellite, and the satellite available at the time was affected by the weather, expensive and it was kind of probably not dissimilar to dial-up in terms of performance. That in terms of performance, uh. So some residents on egg, one of the other directors of headnet, simon hellowell he, he was dealing with edinburgh university and I was uh looking to buy a house on rum and to kind of cut a long story short, we did some trials with some five gigahertz lightly licensed hardware and the kind of general principle that if we could take an internet connection from the mainland and send it wirelessly across the islands, it would give us a better service than we could from us.
Ian Bolas:We could get from the satellite services and I suppose our destiny was a bit more in our own hands. If we did that, if we got people to sign up to it, we could maybe get more bandwidth and things like that. So, as you mentioned it, once we got going with things we had to go to Elgol to get to Canna, which is the most westerly point of the headnet, and so, yeah, we just used Elg a as a bounce between rum and canna. Uh and uh. Obviously then later on, when algol kind of came on board that's when you came on as well, and yeah, you know, we expanded uh to include algol in our, in our networks, like I suppose, as you know, although algol's part of sky, it's quite kind of quite isolated other than the road coming down.
Ian Bolas:So you'll, you'll suffer from, uh, the same issues in some respects as we do on the islands unreliable power, poor internet, things like that. So some of these things you just have to kind of go off and fix yourself, if you can to some extent yeah, well, I know the bt is still, it still has a presence here in algo, but it's zero.
Marc Smith:It's still 0.47 uh meg download speed, so it's still shockingly poor. So I suppose if headnet, headnet had not come along, that's although we have other options now. Uh, on the last maybe two years it's been a massive issue uh, throughout covid and yeah really shone up. How, how, how, how much. You need a reliable internet connection because covid was everyone working from home in this area where there was no. You know, there's no options for for internet besides what we were doing.
Ian Bolas:Yeah I think it's a good point with with the whole covid thing like 2020, 2021, where everyone was working from home or couldn't leave the house or whatever, and the importance of the internet went in rural areas. It went from being kind of, I suppose, a nice to have and might support your business to an essential, with everyone doing Zoom calls, keeping in touch with family, or WhatsApp calls, whatever. And the thing that still gets me now is we set up Hebnet in 2011 with a view it was going to be medium-term option until you know, fibre or whatever got done by BT, scottish government, uk government or whoever. And, as you mentioned, 2025 now, and the broadband speed offered in algol in 2011 was 0.47 and 14 years later it's it's improved to a 0.47, which is nothing. Yeah, and the small aisles annoyed are uh, there is no option with bt. Uh, for any service through the copper telephone lines here.
Ian Bolas:Yeah, and like, as you mentioned, the only real change is starlink, uh, as one of the options and other than kind of, I would say, speed wise it's. It's probably comparable to headnet. When you average out your upload and your download and and download and heavy usage, peak periods and things like that. The main difference between the two products is the cost. I would say that's the main difference there. But it's just crazy that in 14 years there has been zero progress outside of Hebnet in this area.
Marc Smith:Yeah, it's pretty, um, depressing really, because I remember when I moved here in 2011, everyone in the village was oh yeah, btr coming next year, coming next year because I I relied on it a lot because of the, the video work I was doing so like when you've got 0.47 in the dangle the carrot, it never, ever came.
Marc Smith:So I again went to satellite, which is the old two-way system yeah and you're limited to I don't know a certain speed, but I suppose, thankfully, now we've got there's a lot more options. But as you're saying that it was simon um on that l of egg, so he was working with was he working with edinburgh uni for something?
Ian Bolas:and that's how we got in touch with yeah, so yeah, so it was uh a guy called peter buneman, a professor at edinburgh, and he he was uh in a department that was kind of always looking at ways to improve like rural, rural settings of internet or whatever, and he he's from loch horn so he set the stuff up there originally and simon basically got in contact with him about could we do something similar for egg, and that just we we we got equipment off them some of your ubiquity equipment, I think just loaned it to proof of concept, yeah that you could send a signal from aris egg or mal egg on the mainland to egg and then distribute it.
Marc Smith:That was how many miles, is that?
Ian Bolas:So Egg is roughly 15 miles from Mallaig.
Marc Smith:All right right.
Ian Bolas:As does the Crow Flies, yeah, yeah, and Rum's about 16 to 17 miles as the Crow Flies, yeah, and that's how Simon kind of got the initial setup. And when Simon set it up, I think he had 10 houses in cleardale, which is the with a fair sorry, wasn't clear, that was in garmasdale. Uh, he had, I know, 10 houses or something like five, 10 houses there. I think they were paying seven pound fifty each just to cover the cost of like electric and all right, a few other things. And that's how the initial I suppose, proof of concept right there happening isn't it.
Ian Bolas:But I think it's when we talk about back at 2011,. I remember coming to RUM and you click a YouTube video, go and make a cup of tea. By the time you'd done that, you'd hoped it had loaded. By the time you'd done that, you'd hoped it had loaded. And one of the biggest I'd say one of the biggest things I always found would come into the small aisles, or, yeah, I'd say the small aisles was that people's use of the internet was different to the mainland, when I don't think it should be different, because you know we have electric on the small isles.
Ian Bolas:You know each island's got its own grid. You know, with renewables and things like that, and although we're not allowed to use as much electric as other houses, you can still use TVs, washing machines, all these you know, I suppose, things that you'd expect to be able to use on the mainland. Yeah, the only things we don't have an electric side are like showers and cookers, but you, you know there's alternatives for that. You know it's not like you. Just you know you can't have a cooker, it's just a gas cooker, whereas with the internet it was a like, because the internet was so poor here, especially for youngsters or people wanting to work from home. You couldn't have. Facebook wasn't a thing for people because it was just too slow YouTube was not really being experienced properly by people.
Ian Bolas:So things like that, where there was a clear disadvantage to living on an island there in terms of you didn't get the same quality of service for your internet yeah, yeah, whereas you still had. Your electric was normal, you know, your normal water, you know, uh, there was no, no real hardships for your electric and water. I think the internet's classed as a human right now, I think uh yeah and and like electric and water are.
Ian Bolas:So what should the internet be? Suched as a human right now? I think, uh, yeah, and and like electrical water are. So why should the internet be such, you know, so far behind the mainland and it puts you at a disadvantage. You know, uh, and I would. I would say I've certainly seen, since we started hebnet and we you know, we've got fiber in some places and and things that Obviously the internet now is used. People have smartphones here, people have point-of-sale devices. They'll have them in Elgo, you know, at the like Bella Jane, or your the Misty.
Marc Smith:Isle.
Ian Bolas:Misty Isle, places like that and everywhere. No one carries cash anymore on the islands it's all cards you know yeah yeah, or it's a payment on your smartphone. So all of these things now without a reliable internet connection, uh, you know, it just wouldn't work for people, uh and it would it would just affect how these islands have an opportunity to develop.
Ian Bolas:The same with algol as well, and noida, that without a half decent connection just people can't kind of move there. Uh, and I know starlink obviously is kind of like, I suppose, our main competitor and uh, as an option, but like for the likes of, say, misty isle, for example, you know, do they want to be paying 75 pounds a month 12 months of the year? Yeah, yeah, you know it's a big expense uh for people and they don't really, they don't really need, they just need a connection that we don't need 100 meg connection or 200 meg, yeah, yeah, uh, and even if they would manage to get a bt connection at your 0.47 meg, uh, it's still uh, 30 quid a month, 40 quid a month, you know.
Marc Smith:So yes the thing. Yeah, because bt don't charge based on speed, it's just the service as long as you can tick the box with the service, but even that's it like that's you're still getting 30 pound a month.
Ian Bolas:That's it. So it's, it's, it's things like that. And and I know elg is probably a bit different from the small aisles the average salary in the small aisles is just people can't afford to spend £700 or £800 a year on their internet.
Marc Smith:Yeah.
Ian Bolas:So there's quite a few factors in that we've been able to support a bit of growth by doing this project or business model as well which has been quite good yeah.
Marc Smith:So I suppose we're talking about starlink there. So if we can run over some of the options for village halls, so I think the only time that starlink would even enter into it, if there's nothing, you know you've literally got nothing, and and I would consider bt's half a meg nothing, because it would be unbeatable, you know unbeatable and it would. It wouldn't open up any opportunities for businesses. So I think the only chance, the only reason you would need to have starlink would be if there was literally nothing. So no bt presence, no 4g, which is amazingly still a few places in the country with no 4g um.
Marc Smith:I think that would be the only, only the only reason um to have starlink, because I get called up quite a lot through my it it business about starlink and half the time I just say go outside, get your phone out and do a quick speed check on your phone using the 4g. And they've got the 4g available as well and the 4g speeds I have, you know well, you know torrent, which is only, you know, 10 miles from me. I got a speed check of 240 meg there last week when I was checking someone's connection. So that's a good um, good alternative if bt are not there, but see you in terms of what you know about 4g. What are the kind of? There's limitations with 4g as well? What would you say if? If there was 4g, if that was the only option for village halls, what would be the limitations to consider for for that?
Ian Bolas:yeah, I suppose it's tricky with 4g, like you, you you've got some good speeds there in kind of taurine and and where you've been past, and it's, I think, the lack of people, it's purely it's purely lack of people because those cell sites have, say, one gig capacity. If you were to have a, a village hall in a in a small town, uh, or small village even, depending where the cell site is and the distance, the 4g might not be so good at all. Uh, and it's purely kind of based on what other users are on on the cell at the time. I know if you were to go off onto the mainland, you know, to fort william or inverness, like I know, if you've got 5g, it's different but I would. I would be surprised if you've got 4g performance like you get in torrent. Uh, yeah, definitely, and because it could purely be because you've got 500 devices connected in a cell near Inverness, say. The reality is Torin's probably got less than 50 devices connected to it.
Marc Smith:Yeah, I know that when I went to see a rugby game in Murrayfield they were not a single bit. It was full 4G, 4 bars on the phone but not a single bit of data could transfer. That's yeah. Because of the volume of people that were on that, yeah, that mass site that's one thing.
Ian Bolas:It goes to show where, uh, the certainly stadiums where I've been in, stadiums where you've had a sporting event, things like that, and you might try and send a picture of, like the winning try or that kind of thing, yeah. And or new year's eve is another good example of where if, yeah, you know if you're at a concert or a stadium, uh, yeah, the 4g can't hack it that's a good point.
Marc Smith:I still get the odd text about an hour before midnight in new year to say because I can't contact you later on. A happy new year now, and that's still a thing, isn't it really?
Ian Bolas:yeah, and that's it and all, I suppose all of these internet services, they all, they're all based on contention ratios, uh and uh. Depending on the provider, you might work on a content. You know like, I think bt used to go on a 50 to 1 contention on their back, I think if you ordered a business product, it was 40 to 1 or 25 to 1. But it was effectively if you ordered, say, a 2 meg product and this is a long time ago now, I think the way it worked was that BT in their data center would go on the assumption that 2 meg would be enough for 50 users, because when you put the two meg into, say, 50, lots of two meg, you'd have 100 meg and not everyone would be using it at the same time, et cetera, so you'd have less people competing for that kind of bit of bandwidth.
Marc Smith:Yeah, yeah.
Ian Bolas:And if you're buying a business project, it costs more, but no one because you had you were sharing it with less people. Yeah, yeah, and like the only the only true products out there. Uh, your least line products for internet, which obviously very expensive, but that's one-to-one, so you have one gig from, say, your house to Edinburgh.
Marc Smith:Is that effectively what a business plan is? They're always more expensive, so I assume the business plan is more expensive, but it's because you get less people battling for that.
Ian Bolas:There'll be reduced contention I've not looked at the small print for years because I've not been buying business products but it'll be less contention, I would imagine, and they'll try and sell you a better service. You know where it might be a case that they'll respond to your call quicker, things like that. The old leased line products used to have an option I think of like a four, eight or maybe four, eight or 12-hour response on a leased line, but you just pay more money for it. If you wanted a four-hour fix you'd probably pay double or triple the price.
Marc Smith:What's Hibnett's response time?
Ian Bolas:Well, this is the thing. Well, come on to a good thing there. Like I know, we don't offer a response time as such, like typically uh, we'll, it'll be same day. Typically, I would say, yeah, uh and that's not just a response.
Marc Smith:That's more a fix, isn't it? Yes?
Ian Bolas:yeah, typically certainly like if you've got an outage or a device failure, stuff like that, it'll be same day. And one thing with the islands and Noida as well, and even Helgo, I think, it's two weeks before you'll see a BT engineer rock up. And it's not to have a go at BT or BT Openreach, but that's the reality of when you have a line with a big provider go to bt or bt open reach, but that's that's the reality of when you, when you have a line with with a a big provider uh, the response time for your standard residential product they're probably not going to fix it very quickly yeah, yeah that's just the nature of the beast, uh, and like if you, I'd imagine if you had a fault at your cell site in uh elgol, say, or torin, you know, like your 4g, yeah, you could be talking a couple of days potentially I know up the north end of sky.
Marc Smith:They went down and it was about three days yes or uh, yeah it was. It was that someone was someone has a 4g connection in their holiday let and they actually went out and bought starlight because they couldn't be doing with the constant outages from the 4g mast yeah, you and you get these issues.
Ian Bolas:You know it could be that you've got power issues to the site or radio issues or just hardware issues bad cables whatever you know and it's it can impact uh, you know the response times or the availability of a service as well.
Marc Smith:It's a tricky one when it comes to village halls. What would you say? They don't need to do a great deal, but what would you say? A minimum speed they should be trying to target. If they went outside to roughly do a 4G speed check with whatever SIM card they've got, what would be the minimum?
Ian Bolas:Because some of these village halls do have like they have like showings of like live sports or national theater I think, I think, yeah, I think nowadays, I think you'd be you'd be wanting kind of like 50 meg, would be like, yeah, the reality is you could probably stream something pretty well on 10 to 20 uh, but if I suppose, if you have like a kind of, if you're averaging around the 50 mark, you know there's plenty of. You know there's because if if they're streaming an event in a hall, you can't tell everyone, don't use your phone because it'll cause the, it'll cause the rugby to buffer or whatever. Uh, so you need you need enough to support the other devices as well. But then that might be where you set your wireless up or your network in your village hall to prioritize or have a network that's on for the streaming and then a separate network that's all your clients or customers or that side of things.
Marc Smith:Yeah, well, that's a very good link into the Wi-Fi inside the Holly and so thanks for that. So yeah, once you get, say whatever you've got going into the building, be it BT or 4G or Starlink, what's the best way to distribute it around? Because I mean, I get a lot of people asking about wireless meshes and I've never really been a fan of wireless meshes because of the it. Just at least you know if it's not wired, I always think it's an issue. But what's your, what's your opinion on? If it was a village hall asks you, what would you be? What would you be recommending for them?
Ian Bolas:yeah, it's like wireless is such a complicated I think it's a complicated kind of discussion because, like you, like you said that if you have a, typically if you have a wire from between two devices, you know that you've got x amount of capacity between those two points. Yeah, uh, was like wireless mesh type system where, say, you've got the the general traffic going between the meshes to get back to, uh, your router or your switch or whatever you've got it. There's a lot of factors that can upset that uh. So for me, I I personally like to have a, a cabinet where I've got my internet, you know, 4g connection coming in and then a switch and then a cable going to each access point is. Or, you know each wireless device is my preferred way of doing it. Yeah, uh, because you know each wireless device, then all that, all that device is doing, is client related conversations.
Ian Bolas:It's not trying to share stuff around the building and the way point to multi-point things where you've got client devices. All you want is a couple of clients that are outside, say, of the village hall, with a bad signal, and they will probably have to retransmit data because the signal's poor and then they take up airtime. Then, because you know, if you've got like you're trying to download a file outside but your wireless is like on one bar, not five bar there's a good chance you're going to get retransmissions of data between the access point and that device.
Marc Smith:All right, I didn't know that.
Ian Bolas:Yeah, and then basically the way like a wireless device works, there's just time slots on it and there's only so much like so many time slots and the things that you can have. But even when you've got, like, I suppose, multiple channels transmit and receiving uh any device that's uh, having to make the access point work harder is basically kind of dragging your network down to some extent yeah, yeah, uh and it's some of the newer hardware can probably hide it better because they might have, you know, multiple in multiple kind of uh or multiple channels for doing the wireless.
Ian Bolas:Yeah, but even if you, if you've got a few devices on the same wireless network and they're using whatever the channel is, one device or a few devices with really bad signal can upset the ones with good signal, because right you know it's kind of resource wise. It's having to use a bit more resource on the really bad signal yeah.
Marc Smith:So it's a good point if. If part of your hall doesn't have good signal, it's not really worth leaving it alone. You're better to deal with it, because otherwise it'll affect the ones that have got a good signal. It's not just it's not just saying, oh, don't use the room at the back because there's no, there's not decent wifi. If they do, it's affecting the people who are standing right. Could be standing right next to the access point.
Ian Bolas:Yes, yeah, it's clogging up basically what it should be used for. That's right. Yeah, I suppose that's where it's good to have separate access points, uh for uh, each area or whatever you've got you know. So you've got a cable to say, uh, the main hall, or a couple of antenna in the main hall, say, and then you've got, you know, one in the lobby or what you know and one outside, things like that, and then at least if you do have one that's performing badly, it's not like the whole. So if you can imagine if they were meshed together before you know it, you might find it's just one part of the whole is causing all of the access points to just perform poorly.
Marc Smith:Yeah, yeah.
Ian Bolas:And then I suppose with the other thing, with a mesh system, if, potentially, if one or two of the mesh fail, it might be all of it's offline. Yeah, I suppose. Yeah, yeah, if you're cable to each device, uh, you, you've got the kind of you can almost lose one and it maybe won't make a massive difference, yeah, that's a good point on to the wi-fi sort of things you can have.
Marc Smith:So village halls will want to have like a community network but also a network where they can take payments yeah you know, if they have, uh, I don't know, like a, like a party or a kelly or a wedding, they're taking money at the bar. You need to have a secure wi-fi just for that as well. So with these access points you can add in multiple like um wi-fi networks, yes, and then I assume that you can. You can limit each of those wi-fi networks for for speed. So if you're limited to speed say you had 20 you can see the one the admin side of things would be would be more than the general network.
Ian Bolas:Yeah, you can. You can do like, uh, you could limit the bandwidth or prioritize traffic on a particular uh wireless network is a few different ways, I suppose you know. You like, I suppose, the traditional way of having things. You have your, I don't know so, your village hall wi-fi and then your your visitor wi-fi yeah, it'd be typically the village hall wi-fi would be the one that maybe has the point of sale device and any kind of whole related stuff, and then you'd have your guest one for your people turning up and you'd limit the guest one uh, and, and typically it's on a separate vlan, so it's like logically separate yeah, but it's all from the same wireless access point.
Marc Smith:That's it, it's all. You don't have to have different that's devices for a different way.
Ian Bolas:Yeah, you've got one device, but it's presenting several wireless networks and several VLANs, which are like virtual LANs. It's just a way of segregating traffic, that's all it's doing.
Ian Bolas:And that's kind of a pretty standard way of doing it and it saves you having to have, I suppose, this going back a long time now. Sometimes you would have a separate interconnect, separate internet connection for you know the, the till and the point of sale equipment, and then you'd have a. Then you'd have another connection for general, you know, for general internet stuff. You know that's the way you could do it, because then you know physically that internet connection is just for taking payments and then the other one's just for the other stuff, and it's a way of doing it.
Marc Smith:But you could just you could just get a router and kind of like profile things as you yeah, I assume there'll be some village halls that still do that, because they've not really progressed on to well. You know, once you buy your kit, say 10 years ago, and it still works, why would you change it?
Ian Bolas:but when you look at it.
Marc Smith:Yeah, you should relieve but keep reasonably up to date anyway with what's what's new out there, especially the amount of people that go into hall. You know, I know a 10 year old router will not cope with 20 or 30 people in one. No, this is, this is.
Ian Bolas:This is this is another thing that your router for your 8 meg broadband from 15 years ago, uh, you could still use it now, uh, but, like you said, number of devices supported will be not very many. And if you've got a 50 meg internet connection but you've got an old router or not a very good router that does Wi-Fi, there's a good chance your Wi-Fi router is only going to be doing 10, 15 meg that sort of thing. So, yeah, it's important to kind of keep up with those things for sure, because you might think your internet's you know, on the internet it's quite bad, but actually it's the internet's fine, it's the root of it's connected to it. It's the problem yeah, excellent.
Marc Smith:Well, I think we've covered everything there that I wanted to cover and not an awful lot of a stuff for people to take in. But I think, um, no matter where you are I suppose I suppose we're suppose anywhere on the planet there's always an option and it's nice to know, like minimum, minimum speeds are good to know, but also, like the you know, the community part of things, which obviously you and I do is, is also an option as well. It's nice to know. I'm glad. I'm glad we've covered that, because it was interesting to hear, uh, like the full story of hevnet.
Marc Smith:Whilst I'm in in hevnet I've never really heard, I didn't realize it was simon um that was with uh, the guy from edinburgh uni. So it's good to know that it's actually all these things are possible, no matter how rural you are, because what I will do after this uh podcast, I'll I'll get some information together about where we actually are, because a lot of people might not know, like the distance between between you and I just now there's no land and it's about 14 miles, but our connection comes in via, virtually, via wirelessly, into into the village and it's everything it's. So it's amazing what is actually possible. Well, I'm. I'm actually really glad that our internet didn't cut off during the call, because that would have been quite embarrassing yeah, no, I I'm on 4g, not joking.
Marc Smith:Oh yeah, no, that's brilliant yeah well, thanks very much for your time, ian. It's been good to to talk to you about actually about the village hall side of things as well yeah so, hopefully, hopefully, some of these halls that are struggling with it can, uh, take a listen to the podcast and what you've been saying and basically take it and do something about it.
Ian Bolas:No, that's it. That's it and it's. I'm sure a lot of these spirituals there'll be a local or someone that will probably be like quite keen to get involved in putting stuff in, yeah, and doing that sort of stuff. You know so uh yeah, excellent, that's perfect.
Marc Smith:Well cheers, Ian. All right, spot on. Many thanks to our headline sponsor and specialist village hall insurance provider, Allied Westminster, the home of Village Guard, for making this podcast possible, and to online booking system provider Hallmaster, who also sponsor our podcast and can be found at hallmaster. co. uk. You've been listening to the Village Halls podcast, a unique listening community for Britain's village community and church halls and anyone interested in the vital services they provide. Don't forget entries for the Village Halls Inspiration Awards 2025 are open now until the 30th of September, so visit our website to find out more and get involved. We will be back again soon with another episode. For more information, visit thevillagehallspodcast. com, where you'll also find links to our social media pages. Thanks again for listening in and until next time. Goodbye for now.
