PLANS to knock through the tower of a medieval church near Bath — to create a doorway to a new kitchen and toilet, yet to be built — are one step closer to fruition.
The Consistory Court of the diocese of Bath & Wells has granted a faculty for a doorway to be created in the north wall of the medieval tower of the Grade I listed Church of St Julian the Hospitaller, Wellow, six miles south of Bath. The purpose of the doorway is to provide access to a kitchen and toilet that are yet to be built against the external wall.
The petitioners were the Vicar, the Revd Matthew Street, and the two churchwardens. The petition was formally unopposed and had the unanimous support of the PCC; no objections had been received from the parishioners at large. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, however, considered that intervention in the medieval fabric was unjustified.
The petitioners explained that if a decision against the provision of the doorway was postponed until all aspects of the wider scheme for the kitchen and the toilet were finalised, there would be a significant waste of time, effort, and expenditure on the part of the parish. Conversely, if the preferred means of access was permitted, it would be possible to proceed with further detailed work in the confidence that the scheme would not fall at the first hurdle.
If there was to be no breach in the north wall of the tower, the entire project as currently formulated was doomed to failure.
The Diocesan Chancellor, the Worshipful Timothy Briden, said that rule 1 of the Faculty Jurisdiction Rules 2015 set out an overriding objective to “enable the court to deal with cases justly”, and specified that the overriding objective included “saving expense; . . . dealing with the case in ways that are proportionate to the importance of the case and the complexity of the issues and; . . . ensuring that it is dealt with expeditiously and fairly”.
In applying those principles — in particular, the saving of expense and the need for expedition and fairness — it was clear, the Chancellor said, that the issue of the doorway in the tower had to be resolved promptly. Since the petitioners were not ready to present a comprehensive petition covering the entire scheme, it was not practicable simply to direct the question of the doorway to be determined as a preliminary issue.
On 24 June, a direction was given that a petition should be lodged limited to the creation of a doorway in the tower wall for the purpose of giving access to future kitchen and toilet facilities. Should that petition be successful, the petitioners would be at liberty to present a second petition dealing with the rest of the scheme.
At present, the kitchen and toilet facilities at the church were almost non-existent, the Chancellor said, and that gave rise to inconvenience when congregations of the order of 100 could be expected at weddings, funerals, and major festivals, quite apart from falling short of the needs of regular worshippers. The lack of such modern facilities was rightly perceived by the PCC to be an obstacle to growth as well as failure to make effective use of an attractive historic building. The Chancellor said that the petitioners had “established a compelling need for these facilities, at least in some form”.
The petitioners had considered several options and concluded that the creation of a doorway in the north wall of the tower was the best one. They had also sought advice about whether, in the event of a future change of circumstances, it would be possible to close the opening and reinstate the wall. They had been advised following a structural assessment that if “it was ever decided to close the new opening, this would be achieved by simply rebuilding the stonework in a similar way as the exploratory core holes were reinstated”.
“Thus the creation of a new opening was reversible,” the Chancellor said, “albeit without the use of the original stone if that material ceased to be available.”
The Chancellor also considered the advice of several consultees. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings opposed the scheme. The Church Buildings Council “was cautiously receptive in its reaction to the petitioners’ preferred scheme”. Historic England was supportive of the petitioners’ case, and the Ancient Monuments Society “raised no concerns over the proposed breach of the tower shell”.
The DAC did not recommend the petitioners’ scheme. The Chancellor said that the “parish may have done itself a disservice in failing to engage more constructively with the DAC”, and the “tenacity with which it had pursued its preferred option perhaps disguised the extent to which other options had been weighed in the balance and found wanting”. The Chancellor added that it was “doubtful whether returning to the well-trodden path of the options appraisals would yield any fresh insights”.
The Chancellor decided that the petitioners’ preferred option was, on balance, the correct one. That decision, the Chancellor said, was “made in the face of competent specialist opinion and not reached lightly”. It was, however, “fortified by the assessment of Historic England”.
The faculty was issued subject to the condition that no work be undertaken under it, save preliminary archaeological investigation, until a further faculty for the construction of the associated extension had been granted. There were also two further conditions. First, that the size of the doorway be restricted to the minimum extent practicable for the purposes of disabled access, and second, that the petitioners provide the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings with details of the design and material of the lintel and have regard to any advice given by them in that respect.
It was implicit that when the second petition was presented no objection coiuld be admitted in respect of the provision of the tower doorway.