PERMISSION has been given to fence a grassed area next to an unlisted church in Reading, despite complaints from residents.
Granting the college concerning St James’s, Woodley (also often known as St James’ Church Centre, Southlake), the Diocesan Chancellor of Oxford, His Honour the Worshipful David Hodge KC, said that it was not the function of the Consistory Court to make a judgment on complaints of nuisance concerning land adjoining a church constructing.
The Vicar, the Revd Laurence Smith, and one in every of the churchwardens, Christine Clarke, presented a petition, dated 24 October 2024, for a college authorising the fencing of the grassed area, which had been used for kids’s activities and by community groups. Supporting the proposal, the petitioners said that the fence would increase the security of youngsters within the church grounds. Children often played ball-games there after church, with parental supervision. Open grounds increased the chance that children would go after a ball into adjoining gardens or on to the road.
The proposal was approved by the PCC and advisable to the court by the diocesan advisory committee. Local planning permission was not required, since the fence wouldn’t exceed one metre in height from ground level.
The Chancellor said that, if implemented, the proposals wouldn’t lead to any harm to the setting or appearance, or any significance that is likely to be attached to the church constructing. The petitioners had also “demonstrated a transparent and convincing justification for his or her proposed work”, he said.
When the standard public notices were displayed from 24 October to 23 November, they provoked two series of objections from long-term residents of properties near by. Neither of the objectors became a celebration opponent to the church’s petition, nevertheless, which continued unopposed.
Correspondence quoted within the report suggests that relations between the neighbours and the church had broken down over time. The residents wrote that the church was “becoming a really disrespectful and un-neighbourly a part of the Southlake area”, and that “When the church prolonged their property they promised us that they might not hold any activities on the front of the church. This promise has been broken repeatedly for years.”
Children had kicked balls into their properties and had trampled their flowerbeds, the neighbours wrote. The fence, they suggested, would only encourage more noise and fewer supervision, and the rise the prospect that children would run out of the fenced area and into residents’ properties.
Chancellor Hodge said that, in his position as Chancellor of the Blackburn diocese, he had recently had to contemplate objections to a college petition founded on assertions of potential nuisance within the case of St Paul’s, North Shore, Blackpool.
He repeated what he had said in that case: namely, that complaints of nuisance to adjoining land were matters for the civil courts and never for consistory courts. The granting of a college by the consistory court, which authorised particular works, didn’t make these works immune from a challenge within the civil courts in accordance with the final law governing nuisance. Granting a college only made the works carried out immune from challenge under ecclesiastical law.
The petitioners’ response to the objectors was that they wanted “to be good neighbours”, and were prepared to satisfy the objectors “to air their grievances and to correct inaccuracies or misunderstandings”, recognising that there have been “clearly other objections too that [were] unrelated to the fence proposal”.
The Chancellor said that he could do nothing more to deal with the objectors’ concerns, but that granting the college sought by the church would under no circumstances derogate from the objectors’ rights and remedies. A college was granted for the fencing provided that it was to not be painted.
