The petitioner sought a faculty for the exhumation of her still-born son from the consecrated part of Wandsworth Cemetery for reburial in consecrated ground in Winchester. At the time of the burial the family was living in Chelsea, in a flat tied to the petitioner's employment as a nanny. The burial was in Wandsworth where she and her husband hoped to make their family home. The proposed move to Wandsworth failed because their original purchase fell through and increased property prices made a move unaffordable in the longer term. However, the arrival of two more children meant that the need to move was acute and the family made their home in Winchester.

The petitioner continued to mourn her son and a year after the family's move to Winchester she brought her petition. Granting the faculty, despite initial reservations, the chancellor observed that the decision was an entirely pastoral exception to the essential norm of the permanence of Christian burial. Having reviewed the exceptions in Re Blagdon Cemetery [2002] Fam 299 he noted that there was a parallel with the Blagdon case in that the cases both involved tragically young deaths of children. In order to avoid setting a precedent it was observed that any application for a second exhumation, should the family move again, would be highly unlikely to be successful. The fact that the exhumation would also free up a four-person grave in the somewhat stretched Wandsworth Cemetery was not really material. [Catherine Shelley]