The petitioners sought a faculty for a major re-ordering project in this Cambridge city-centre Grade II* listed church, as their numbers and plans for mission necessitated additional meeting space and seating. The plans included replacing the vestry with a four-storey building for meeting rooms, knocking a door through the organ chamber to access the rooms and create offices, creating a foyer and entrance lobby in the passage to the hall, installing a kitchen under the south transept gallery, creating a new door and entrance to replace the chancel stairs lost to the kitchen development, removal of pews, the pulpit, the altar and all chancel furniture save for a chair used by Charles Simeon, and shortening and covering the reredos with a partition to create storage space. In addition, the floor was to be re-laid in stone and covered in carpet. Aspects of the plans were opposed by the Georgian Society, the Victorian Society, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and Historic England. The main points of contention related to the removal of the altar and pulpit, hiding the Bodley-designed reredos, the destruction of a mediaeval wall to create a doorway, the creation of the kitchen and the carpeting of the floor.

Applying the Duffield guidelines, the chancellor held that the scheme would cause harm to the significance of the building, with significant listed features being particularly affected. The faculty to remove the altar, which had been moved to the eastern edge of the chancel, was refused on the basis that the altar provided a focal point to the chancel and should be retained because of its significance for Anglican worship. The claim that covering of the reredos was needed to enable the ‘transformation of lives’ did not demonstrate sufficient need to outweigh the harm that would be caused; the faculty for that aspect of the work was refused but the reredos could be brought forward to create storage space behind it and cleaned to lighten its appearance. The removal of the pulpit was held to be justified by the fact that it was a less significant feature of the building than the altar or reredos and was unusable in any event as the steps had been removed in an earlier re-ordering. Nor was the vestry, which was built as a Victorian displacement of earlier mediaeval architecture, of particular significance; its replacement for the building of meeting rooms was therefore justified.

The chancellor also found that harm would be caused by the installation of the kitchen, by the door in the mediaeval wall, by the damage to the organ loft creating access to the meeting rooms and by the new porch and hallway entrance. However, the missional needs identified clearly provided significant public benefit which outweighed the harm to the features affected. In addition, the retention of features such as stone tracery over the window in the wall mitigated the harm caused. The chancel furniture, including with reluctance the fine Victorian choir stalls, could be removed and the Charles Simeon chair retained elsewhere in the building. There was some confusion over the removal of pews arising from various modifications of the scheme. In an addendum to the original judgment the chancellor clarified his position and, having permitted the removal of the Victorian choir stalls and the replacement of the Victorian pews in the nave with more flexible non-upholstered seating, he refused the application to remove the Georgian pews, which were of greater significance and could be accommodated in the south gallery with some modification to be agreed with the Diocesan Advisory Committee. It was agreed that the flooring should be consistently replaced through the building, although with tiles suitable for the underfloor heating rather than the stone originally envisaged. However, the application to carpet the floor was rejected as not necessary for mission or safety and as being overly domestic in character. [Catherine Shelley]