The vicar and churchwardens petitioned for a faculty to authorise the building of an extension on the north side of this Grade II listed church to accommodate toilets, kitchen, store room, meeting room and refurbished choir vestry and vicar's vestry. The petition also sought authority for some re-ordering of the interior of the church. The proposed extension involved building over one grave and close to two others. The proposals had been adapted to meet concerns previously expressed by the Victorian Society. The Diocesan Advisory Committee recommended the works for approval. Twenty-one letters of objection were received by the registry; none of the objectors became a party opponent. A public petition signed by a large number of people objecting to the proposals was submitted to the registry. Although rule 14.5(1) of the Faculty Jurisdiction Rules 2015 now permitted consideration of all relevant material before the court so that a public petition was no longer strictly inadmissible, the objection to public petitions identified by the Court of Arches in Rector and Churchwardens of Capel St Mary, Suffolk v Packard [1927] P 289 – that the court did not know what representations had been made to the signatories before their signatures were obtained – remained relevant. The court could place very little reliance on such petitions. In any event a public petition which said no more than that the signatories formally objected to proposals added nothing of substance to what was said in the letters of objection that had been submitted in response to the public notice and did not require separate consideration.

As the proposals did not involve harm to the significance of the listed building, the petitioners needed only to satisfy the test set out in Peek v Trower [1881] P 21. The interments in the grave over which the extension would be built took place in 1975 and 1980. One parishioner who had sent a letter of objection stated that the deceased were from a branch of their family; other letters objected to building over the grave but did not claim any relationship with the deceased. As the churchyard remained in use for burials, and in any event because the proposed extension was for the purpose of enlarging the church, the prohibition on building in the Disused Burial Grounds Act 1884 did not apply. Had it done so, it seemed likely that building over the grave in question could in any event have been authorised under section 18A of the Care of Churches and Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction Measure 1991 because, although interments had taken place in the land in question within the previous 50 years, a person who merely claimed that the deceased were part of their family tree did not qualify as a personal representative or relative of the deceased for the purposes of that section.

The chancellor did not accept, as some objectors had suggested, that building over the grave amounted to desecration, and referred to the treatment of objections to the same effect in Re St Andrew, Backwell (Bath and Wells Consistory Court, 1982, unreported), where Newsom Ch held that adding to a church was a good reason for permitting interference with human remains provided every reasonable precaution was taken. In the present case, like the Backwell case, the building would rest on narrow piles driven into the ground, thereby avoiding the need for general excavation. Other graves which would be close to the walls of the proposed extension could be protected during the building works, if necessary by temporarily removing memorials. The fact that the parish could, on occasion and for the payment of fees, use a community building some 200 yards from the church did not mean that the facilities that would be contained in the proposed extension were not needed. What was to be provided in the extension was simply a standard, reasonable expectation for any busy church. The petitioners had shown that the proposals would make things better than they were – that the church would be more convenient, more fit for the accommodation of the parishioners who worship there, more appropriate or more adequate to its purpose that it was before – and had accordingly discharged the test in Peek v Trower. A faculty was granted subject to the usual conditions to protect human remains. [Alexander McGregor]