WOODFORD PARISH CHURCH MEMORIAL HALL

ANNUAL LECTURE

To be taken on a virtual tour of the Memorial Hall

by the photographer Frank Wieder, click here.

The first Memorial Hall lecture took place in April 2006, when Peter Lawrence presented ‘From Country House to Community Hall’ a lecture on the history of the hall’s site.

In the second lecture in October 2006, Derek Baker talked about William Morris and his Essex roots.

For the third lecture, in December 2007, the Very Revd. Dr John Arnold, a former Dean of Durham Cathedral, gave a personal reminiscence of Woodford during the 1940’s and 1950’s and of Sylvia Pankhurst, for whom his mother worked as a secretary.

The fourth lecture in 2009 given by Dr William Fawcett, Chadwick Fellow of Architecture at Pembroke College Cambridge, was entitled ‘Between Heritage and the Bulldozer’.  It challenged us to judge buildings on their merits, not their age, and was given as a tribute to Ian Noble, an architect and one of the Hall’s most effective and longstanding Trustees, who died in 2008.

Details of the fifth lecture, planned for the autumn of 2010, will be posted in due course on this website.

Ian Noble, Trustee of the Hall from 1985 till his death in 2008, inspecting refurbishment work on the magnificent fleche surmounting the Hall, a project which he masterminded.  The photo was taken in 2007.