December 2019 A message from the Hall Management Committee (reproduced from the Parish magazine). "Thank you to everyone who came up to us and said just how good the Hall looked at Fr. Dominic’s leaving presentation. There have been times when we thought it would never be finished, so goodness knows how many people in the parish must have wondered how we kept getting funding awards but nothing seemed to be happening. Then the building work started….and seemed to go on for ever.
We want to give our thanks to Fr. Dominic who had faith that we knew what we were doing and authorised the spending of money in the hope that it would work, to Keely Tatterfield our marvellous fund raising advisor who conjured grants from the Lottery, Veolia, The Garfield Weston Foundation and the Anthony Gubay Foundation, to Naomi and Mary from APEC architects who designed the hall everyone has admired so much, to our main contractors Jericho Builders for the quality of their work and especially to Paul the Site Foreman, to our professional advisors as quantity surveyors, electrical and mechanical engineers, structural engineers and so on.
What was especially good was the way everyone working on the project regarded it as their project and took real pride in it."
History of the B12 Urban Village Hall
There has been a Roman Catholic church on this site in Balsall Heath since 1896 with a school opened on site in 1911 by the church. The school was very popular and eventually closed to make way for another two Parish schools to serve the local community - St Martin de Porres and SS John and Monica Catholic Primary Schools.
The school buildings are now the home of Anawim and the old school hall has been transformed into the B12 Urban Village Hall, a project completed in December 2019. As of 2022, after the unexpected pandemic and lockdowns, the hall is now up and running and we are working hard to increase our bookings, provide a service to the local community, and meet the potential the hall definitely holds….
