The Ackerbourne Valley Choir will mark its hundredth year this month with a concert in the parish church, performing a programme that reaches back through every decade of the choir’s existence. Tickets for the evening sold out within a week of going on sale.

Founded in the years after the First World War by a group of valley villagers who met to sing in a barn, the choir has met almost without interruption ever since, pausing only for the second war and, briefly, for the pandemic.

A programme spanning a century

Rather than a single style, the anniversary concert will move through the choir’s own past:

• Folk settings collected from valley villages in the 1920s
• Wartime songs the choir sang on tour to nearby garrisons
• Commissions written for the choir’s fiftieth and seventy-fifth years
• A new piece setting words about the Ackerbourne itself

The choir has also digitised its earliest programmes and photographs, which will be displayed in the church porch for the run of the concert and afterwards deposited with the town archive.

Organisers say the hardest part has been keeping the guest list manageable, with former members writing in from across the country to say they hope to return for the occasion. A hundred years on, the barn that started it all is long gone, but the singing has outlasted it.

Related: Arts & Culture coverage · the old maltings makers' workshop

Further reading: About choirs

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The Wrenfield Post