Notable Erections and Prominent Features

 

The Village Hall stands on stilts over a bog. Its floor is so rotten that dancers have to be very wary where they step. The kitchen boasts an urn used not onlyVillage Hall 30 pc for tea but for boiling the footballers’ strip and making toffee apples; every so often Dennis has to unbung the urn tap and clean it thoroughly.  Events held in the hall include WI Brawn Mornings, dances and blood donor sessions, sometimes simultaneously. The hall power supply comes from a street lamp outside.

Stink PipeThe Bull. This is Grunty Fen’s pub, run by Stan and Rene. Because of its height above the gents’, the Bull’s stink pipe is a local landmark.  Dennis lost his eyebrows during a hadnabinfer at The Bull which also managed to involve the village hall tea urn; that episode is The Stink Pipe Hadnabinfer from the album Archive Editions 3.

The Spam Pillbox is one of many concrete fortifications left over from World War II. Spam pill box 30 pcDennis discovered this one long after the war and far out on the fen. Inside he found a massive store of 1943 Spam which had lain undisturbed like Tutankhamun’s tomb. A few tins are still edible but others explode at a touch.

Hitler's Hole 20 pcHitler’s Hole
is a bottomless flooded pit which appeared on the allotments during a wartime bombing raid. Now used for the rapid disposal of stolen goods or anything embarrassing.

 Monks’ Bushes is an area of dank scrub where Dennis secretly stores his accumulated capital: a huge heap of very valuable railway sleepers. For the origins of its name, see Religion.

Bus Shelter 30 pcThe Half-Timbered Bus Shelter and Millennium Youth Club is so called because half its original timbers were stolen for fuel during a hard winter.

Grunty Fen Academical FC Pavilion is a large furniture van kitted out like a lounge bar and travels to away matches. The Cricket Club Pavilion is a converted hen coop with a scoreboard sharing numbers with the church, leading to worshippers occasionally trying to sing Hymn Number 124 Not Out. You can hear Dennis telling Mr South about cricket on The Best of Dennis Volume 1 and there’s more information about the use of camouflage in cricket in Mr South’s excellent book The Customs and Folklore of Grunty Fen.

Niven Parr is Grunty Fen’s most notable architect (see Who’s Who in Grunty Fen). He is famed for  making use use of almost any building material and style in conjunction with any other with the exception of corrugated iron sheeting  To find out more about the architecture of Grunty Fen, please see The Authorised Guide to Grunty Fen.