NATIONAL Lottery bosses have given a new year boost to plans for a new £200,000 village hall for Church Lawton.

Members of Lawton Memorial Hall Trust have raised £23,000 towards the hall, and have planned 14 fund-raising events for 1999.

They have also been promised grants totalling £40,000 towards the project, work on which could start in the spring.

However the biggest grant has come from the National Lottery Charities Board, which this week gave £50,000 to the scheme.

The trustees are hoping to hit their fund-raising target by March, and building work on the new hall will take between three and four months to complete.

''We are overjoyed with the news of the lottery grant,'' said chairman of trustees Annette Cooper.

''There is still some way to go and more hard work to be done, but we are confident that with the amount of commitment shown by everyone involved we are well on our way to achieving our aim.''

The new hall will contain a larger main hall and a separate meeting room, together with a bar, servery and kitchen.

It will be half as big again as the current hall, which was built in 1954 and will be demolished once the new hall is opened.

The trustees are also hoping to win grant aid from the Rural Development Corporation.

Converted for the new archive on 13 March 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.