Project · Village Hall Booking

Kirksanton Village Hall is a community venue in the village of Kirksanton, South Cumbria. The hall has three distinct bookable spaces — the Main Hall, the Meeting Room (which doubles as the Spin Cycle fitness studio), and Whole Venue Hire. Three different products, three different pricing schedules, tiered by user type (Local Resident, Non-Local, Business). Previously run on a paper diary and phone calls.

The Village Hall Booking platform is a custom WordPress plugin. Each space — Main Hall, Meeting Room/Spin Cycle, Whole Venue — is a structured record with its own pricing matrix across the three user tiers, its own deposit rules, its own minimum-booking duration, and its own associated compliance documents.

Each booking is an event against that space, with a user, a date range, a payment status, a deposit status, and required document acknowledgements. WooCommerce + Stripe handle the payment flow.

Live calendar

The availability calendar is the part most bookers actually use. A 7-day rolling view shows green for available, amber for provisional bookings, orange for awaiting payment, red for confirmed. The booker scrolls forward and back through weeks, sees instantly what is free, picks their start time directly from the calendar, and the booking flow takes over from there. The calendar updates in real time across every browser viewing it.

Beyond pure space hire, the platform powers the hall's What's On programme — community film nights, fitness classes, quiz nights, fundraisers, seasonal events. Each event has its own listing page, optional ticket pricing, capacity tracking, and online sales through the same Stripe + WooCommerce flow as space bookings.

The hall has shifted from paper sign-up sheets at the post office to an online ticket system the village actually uses.

Built-in compliance

A £25 breakage deposit is required for every hall booking, with the £5 key deposit refundable on return. Commercial bookings require 4 weeks advance payment and proof of public liability insurance — captured and enforced through the booking workflow before the booking can confirm. Cancellations within 48 hours are charged at the full rate. Terms of Hire and the relevant risk assessment are presented and acknowledged as part of the booking flow.

Kirksanton is a small village. The hall is run by a small committee. The booking volume is real but not vast — the system needs to handle hundreds of bookings a year reliably, not tens of thousands. What matters most for this kind of venue is not throughput, but that the operation runs cleanly without absorbing volunteer time on manual chasing, manual paperwork, manual insurance checks.

The platform handles all of that — and the committee can focus on the part computers cannot do.

What this proves

A rural village hall can have a booking, ticketing, deposit, and compliance system that matches anything a much larger commercial venue runs — at a price point that fits a community-run charity budget. The Village Hall Booking platform is live at Kirksanton and is now a productised Technophobia offering for any village hall, community centre, or community-managed venue.

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