THE Diocesan Chancellor of Bristol has criticised a bunch of petitioners from St Bartholomew’s, Bristol, for his or her “contemptuous attitude to the school system”, after the group applied, retrospectively, for permission to demolish and replace the church porch.
The “collective amnesia” of the parties involved within the work, from whom the Chancellor, the Worshipful Justin Gau, struggled to acquire written statements, was “little in need of incredible”, he said.
None the less, within the Consistory Court, he reluctantly granted a confirmatory faculty for the work, which was carried out unlawfully at St Bartholomew’s, Bristol, in 2017 and 2018. An area described either as a “porch screen”, a “vestibule”, or a “draught lobby” was demolished, and a pair of wood doors were removed and replaced with glass panelled doors.
In his judgment, nonetheless, the Chancellor said that he desired to make it “abundantly clear” that he took “a really dim view of the behaviour” of those that had carried out the work, and of their “contemptuous attitude to the school system”.
St Bartholomew’s is an unlisted church in-built 1894, and isn’t in a conservation area. In 2017, a school was granted for its reordering, after the boiler had broken down two years previously and had still not been repaired. The illegal destruction of the porch and the removal of the wood doors took place during that reordering. The congregation later moved into the previous Horfield Baptist Church and was looking for an order to shut legally St Bartholomew’s for worship.
At the outset of the Chancellor’s inquiries, the petitioners had seemed unwilling to help him over precisely when the illegal work was carried out and whether it was done deliberately, he said. But they’d subsequently cooperated and engaged a barrister, Jacqueline Humphreys, to help them, and elected Jane Auld, a retired barrister with ecclesiastical-law experience, as a latest churchwarden to take care of the petition.
The Chancellor asked for written statements to be taken from “appropriate parties”, who included the project manager, members of the clergy, members of the congregation, builders, and others who had been involved in carrying out the illegal work. The Chancellor received little help from them, nonetheless, and commented that the “collective amnesia from all involved on this behaviour is nothing short of incredible”.
The Chancellor reminded the petitioners that the Church of England’s “privileged position of having the ability, broadly, to police its own planning controls” was a “cherished right” that got here with “great responsibilities”.
Ms Humphreys submitted that the illegal actions had caused little or no harm to the importance of the constructing as one in every of special architectural or historic interest, and that the changes had opened up the doorway to offer a greater feeling of welcome. She submitted that, because the draught lobby had been destroyed, it might not be possible to make a restoration order, just as in cases through which a font had been destroyed or cremated stays had been unlawfully exhumed.
The Chancellor disagreed. He said that, were he to simply accept Ms Humphreys’s submission, “a troubling precedent might be created on this diocese simply to destroy items without the advantage of a school”. The Chancellor inclined towards the view of the Victorian Society that the illegal removal of the draught lobby had caused the constructing to be unlistable.
Since the constructing was in truth unlisted when the illegal work was carried out, nonetheless, the Chancellor was, he said, “just persuaded” that the harm caused was not so serious that a confirmatory faculty mustn’t be granted. He, subsequently, accepted the disproportionate nature of refusing a confirmatory faculty.
The Chancellor accepted the apologies made on behalf of the petitioners by Ms Auld, but noted his irritation at the shortage of concern shown by the clergy within the parish and their contractors about what had occurred.
The confirmatory faculty was granted for the removal of the draught lobby and the removal of the unique wood doors provided that those doors were stored safely in order that whoever took on the unique constructing had the chance to revive them.
The petitioners were ordered to pay the prices of the petition, including the correspondence costs of the Registry involving a lot of emails to the Chancellor.
