About the Trust

Northfield Hall is owned and run by the community through Brackenhall Community Trust, a registered charity run by local volunteers. The Trust exists to keep the hall open, affordable and useful, and money raised through hall hire and donations goes back into running and improving the building.

Where the hall came from

There has been a community building on this estate since 1940, when Brackenhall Community Centre opened on Longhill Road. Huddersfield Corporation had just finished building the estate around it, 893 homes put up between 1938 and 1940, and the centre was where the new neighbourhood met. It was one large hall, and it served Brackenhall and Sheepridge for more than seventy years.

Northfield Hall is not that building. It is a different building on a different site, about half a mile away.

Why there is a new one

Brackenhall was rebuilt from 1997 onwards. Hundreds of ageing council houses came down and new homes, roads and open spaces went up, and the old single-hall centre no longer fitted the range of groups using it.

Brackenhall Community Trust was set up to build and run a replacement, becoming a company in September 2006 and a registered charity in April 2008. Plans went through the Deighton and Brackenhall Initiative, the partnership behind the wider regeneration, and a former sports field off Norfolk Avenue was chosen as the site. Building work started in July 2011.

Community groups moved across from Longhill Road in May 2012. The late Joan Mallinson, who chaired the Trust and was a lifelong member of Brackenhall United Reformed Church, opened the new hall. The church moved with them, into a purpose-built worship space inside the building.

The difference is not only that the building is newer. The old centre was run for the community. This one is owned by it, held in trust by a charity whose members are local residents. An outside organisation managed the hall on the Trust’s behalf at first; that ended in October 2017, when running costs outran income, and the Trust has run the building itself ever since.

The fuller story, including what is still unknown about the Longhill Road centre, is in More than 80 years of community history.

A building that costs less to run

The hall has solar panels and a heat pump. That cuts its running costs, which matters a great deal to a charity spending more than it earns, and it cuts its carbon footprint, which matters to the businesses, schools and public bodies that hire it and have to account for that sort of thing.

Membership

Membership of the Trust is open to anyone living in its area of benefit: Brackenhall, Sheepridge and the immediately surrounding streets of north Huddersfield. Members have a say in how the hall is run, can vote at the annual general meeting, and can stand for election as trustees.

To ask about joining, get in touch.

How the Trust is run

The Trust is governed by a board of trustees, all of them volunteers and all of them unpaid. They are elected by the membership and are responsible for the building, the finances and the way the hall is run day to day. Day-to-day bookings are handled by the bookings coordinator rather than by the board.

Brackenhall Community Trust is a registered charity, number 1123920. Its registered address is Northfield Hall, 40 Norfolk Avenue, Huddersfield HD2 1GS. Its trustees, annual accounts and annual reports are all public on the Charity Commission register.