About Us

HallsHire.com is a directory of halls and venues for hire, with more than 6,640 listings across the UK and beyond. These include village halls, community centres, church halls, pubs, schools, hotels and many other types of venue. It is free to add a listing, and we do not charge commission on bookings. The aim is simply to help local venues get found by people looking for somewhere to hire.

HallsHire is now run by me and my wife, Lisa. It remains a small, independent operation, which means we can keep it focused on what it was originally created to do: help halls attract bookings without needing to build and maintain a website of their own.

Many halls still use their HallsHire page as their only website. Some even sell advertising space to local businesses to help with their running costs. Other venues have websites of their own and use HallsHire as an additional source of enquiries. It can help them reach people searching online who might not otherwise find the venue's main website.

The site has changed considerably since 2003. It has been rebuilt twice, first as a custom PHP application and later as the Laravel-based website you are using today. We are continuing to improve it and are currently working on several new features, including using AI where it can make the site more useful.

HallsHire was founded in 2003 by my late father, Richard Freeman, and me, Tom Freeman. Richard was chairman of his village hall committee and wanted to make it easier for halls like his to be found online. I had recently graduated from university studying Computing @ UWE in Bristol, so I built the first version of the site in Perl and it's been part of the family ever since.