A NEW community hall is unlikely to be built in Market Lavington unless land on the site is sold off for housing, a meeting in the village was told last week.

Peter Furminger, chairman of the village community hall trust, told the annual meeting at Lavington School last Thursday that he could see no other way of financing the project but to sell off half the land being let to them by the parish council.

But he assured the meeting that any building would be of small-scale cottage design and would fit in with the rest of the community hall scheme.

Two applications for lottery funding for the scheme, expected to cost between £500,000 and £600,000, have already been turned down and Mr Furminger said that he was not confident about the chances of a third.

He added: "We have looked at a number of options, including looking at other hall types to what was originally envisaged and cutting down the size of the hall, but we came to the conclusion that we would have to sell off half the site to fund the project."

A public meeting in March came down heavily against selling off land to finance the scheme.

Mr Furminger replied that unless building began soon the parish council could be forced to release all the land for house building.

Parish council chairman Peggy Jones told the meeting that, under their lease with the trust, the hall should be built by 2007 or the lease would revert to the parish council.

Market Lavington is the largest village in Kennet without its own village hall. The money from the sale of the last hall, which had become dilaptidated, is still in a trust fund but is a small proportion of the expected cost of building a new hall. Currently, the trust has £110,547 in its balances.