PERMISSION has been given to fence a grassed area next to an unlisted church in Reading, despite complaints from residents.

Granting the faculty concerning St James’s, Woodley (also 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 building.

The Vicar, the Revd Laurence Smith, and one of the churchwardens, Christine Clarke, presented a petition, dated 24 October 2024, for a faculty authorising the fencing of the grassed area, which had been used for children’s activities and by community groups. Supporting the proposal, the petitioners said that the fence would increase the safety of children in the church grounds. Children often played ball-games there after church, with parental supervision. Open grounds increased the risk that children would go after a ball into adjacent gardens or on to the road.

The proposal was approved by the PCC and recommended to the court by the diocesan advisory committee. Local planning permission was not required, because the fence would not exceed one metre in height from ground level.

The Chancellor said that, if implemented, the proposals would not result in any harm to the setting or appearance, or any significance that might be attached to the church building. The petitioners had also “demonstrated a clear and convincing justification for their proposed work”, he said.

When the usual 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 party opponent to the church’s petition, however, which continued unopposed.

Correspondence quoted in 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 very disrespectful and un-neighbourly part of the Southlake area”, and that “When the church extended their property they promised us that they would not hold any activities at the front of the church. This promise has been broken continuously 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 less supervision, and the increase 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 consider objections to a faculty petition founded on assertions of potential nuisance in 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 not for consistory courts. The granting of a faculty by the consistory court, which authorised particular works, did not make these works immune from a challenge in the civil courts in accordance with the general law governing nuisance. Granting a faculty 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 meet the objectors “to air their grievances and to correct inaccuracies or misunderstandings”, recognising that there were “clearly other objections too that [were] unrelated to the fence proposal”.

The Chancellor said that he could do nothing more to address the objectors’ concerns, but that granting the faculty sought by the church would in no way derogate from the objectors’ rights and remedies. A faculty was granted for the fencing on condition that it was not to be painted.