About 4 week's ago (end of March 2008), I was walking around Arbury Park on a Saturday morning with a couple of South Cambs Councillors and we noticed the builders at the Community Centre were working. Being opportunists we asked the foreman if we could sneak a first peak at what was being provided for the residents, and we were invited to have a quick look at our own risk.

Now I need to point out before anyone else does, that we have since had our knuckles severely rapped for breaching H&S guidelines and not wearing high visibility jackets and hard hats, and we're extremely sorry sir.

The community centre is largely looking good - a foyer, two large meeting rooms for 60 & 90 people, various store rooms, office space, a commercial kitchen and cafe area (with outside space as well) and the usual range of toilets.

Unfortunately, there is a problem and it's not small (well actually it is, rather ironically!)...it's the ceiling height in these 'large' halls. In the foyer and the cafe area, the ceiling height is at least 3m, but as soon as you move in to either of the meeting halls, this drops to a rather dismal 2.4m, and a really rather distressing 2.35m under the a/c units and along the back wall of the larger meeting room where they appear to have mis-built the ventilation ducts and had to lower an entire section of the suspended ceiling to accomodate this.

Now this won't cause any undue problems for those that are 'height-challenged' or for activities that involve lots of sitting, but anyone over 5' 9" will easily be able to touch the ceiling when stretching their hands above their heads, and will be regularly grazing their knuckles on the a/c units!

So you need to think again if you thought that the community centre would be able to host:

• Keep fit
• Martial arts
• Ball room dancing
• Discos
• Live music
• Drama
• Plays
• Business presentations
• Wedding receptions
• Table tennis
• Film clubs
• Parties (private or public)

However, we should be okay for:

• Table top sales
• Spinning
• Fetes (although a Christmas tree might be an issue!)
• Children's activities (so long as the adult supervisors aren't too tall)
• Sit down meetings
• Large meetings where it doesn't matter if most of the people can't see who's speaking
• Keep fit (except step) and martial arts for anyone under 5' 6"
• Step aerobics for anyone under 5'

Personally (and I know there are many others who support this view), I don't think these halls are fit for purpose - Gallagher's own web site promotes Arbury Park as having community facilities with a 'multi-purpose hall' (link is here).

Village hall design guidelines from Sport England (see here) recommend a minimum of 3m for any excercise activities, drama, gigs etc.

I have raised a number of questions with Gallagher - at this time, none have been answered:

• Has this architect designed any previous community centres?
• Can they show us any other community centres with community halls that have ceiling heights like this?
• What was the original specification for the community centre, including intended uses?
• Who was part of the approval process for these designs (it doesn't appear that either IPC or SCDC were)?

Of course we're now in to a minefield of legal issues, as nobody's accepting responsibility for this mess - it will cost several tens of thousands of pounds to properly fix this issue as the roof space above the suspended ceiling has been filled by a heating and ventilation system that could (I quote) "service a small cruise liner". This will likely have to be removed and redesigned to provide anything more than an increase in ceiling height of a few inches.

But it might well cost the parish council tens of thousands of pounds in lost revenue from hall lettings over the next few years - we've already had to turn away two fitness classes that wanted to rent the halls.

I'm also concerned that this heating and ventilation system has been massively over specified, with the parish council having to cope with unnecessarily large maintenance payments in the future.

And of course, it presents both South Cambs District Council and Impington Parish Council with a horrible dilemma of should they wait for the building to be fixed before accepting it, in which case it won't be available for any community activities for months yet, or should they accept it and trust that the issues will be fixed retrospectively with minimal disruption to any parallel use of the facilities.

I wonder when this issue would have come to light if we hadn't (inappropriately) had our 'sneak peak'?

ps I'm thinking about a new Arbury Park game..."spot the construction worker wearing their high visibility jacket AND hard hat"...any takers?