Listed church can pull out pews, judge rules
A CHURCH judge has ignored heritage bodies’ warnings of “irreparable damage” over removing pews from a listed building in order to create more space for parishioners.
The Church of Holy Trinity, a Grade II-listed Georgian church in Clapham, south London, applied to the Consistory Court to remove the nave pews and replace them with stackable chairs. Officials claim that in recent years, it has experienced “significant growth” and has been designated by the bishop as a resourcing church to encourage the development of other parishes.
However, heritage bodies, including Historic England, the Georgian Group and the Victorian Society, objected to the proposals to remove the pews and to add to the existing extensions at the Church of Holy Trinity, claiming it would cause “significant harm” to the “character of the church”, which opened in 1776, “and therefore [its] significance”.
They also said that removing the pews would “remove any sense of a coherent interior”.
Yet Philip Petchey, chancellor of the Diocese of Southwark, granted a faculty for the plans to go ahead at the church.
“I have reached a clear judgment that weighing public benefit and need against harm, the former does outweigh the latter,” he said.
Parish churches are struggling to catch up with the financial loss incurred by the pandemic, with dwindling congregants and donations, as well as the rise of secularism across society. In January, The Sunday Telegraph revealed that service attendance had nearly halved in between 1987 and 2019, and the only area of the country to see an increase in worshippers was London.