| home | search | back | helmdon.com®   home > village groups > helmdon village cell of tove valley baptist fellowship   Helmdon Village Cell of Tove Valley Baptist Fellowship   What's happening to the Chapel at Helmdon? - February 2006 At the moment nothing is happening to the Chapel at Helmdon. This is unfortunate for the village and for the Chapel's owners, who are unsure what to do next. Here is a bit of the history of what caused the Baptists to leave the Chapel and what happened when they applied for permission to redevelop the Chapel site. The Chapel became unusable nearly three years ago when a large vertical fissure suddenly appeared in the north wall. This occurred soon after the building had been full of people for a service - a rare event. Alarmed, the congregation contacted the Baptist Union, the building's trustee. The Baptist Union advised them to make an immediate structural survey and recommended a surveyor. The survey revealed that Helmdon Chapel had become dangerous to use and that, because the building lacked foundations, to make it safe would need basic repairs costing upward of £130,000. Realising that, even after paying this large amount, the building would still require other essential repairs to be done (especially to the roof and windows) and also needed extensive modernisation, the congregation closed the building and moved to the old Chapel at Weston, which they also owned. Knowing that they would not repair the Helmdon Chapel the Baptists applied for Outline Planning Permission to build two houses on the site following the demolition of the Chapel and Schoolroom. This was refused. Twice more they have submitted revised outline plans and each has been rejected. The South Northants Council's Planning Committee now require a Full Planning Application, not an Outline, before they will consider it again. The reasons given for the three rejections vary. Some would make Helmdonians smile. For example: the notion that the Chapel and its schoolroom is a fine building, in keeping with character of the village (the schoolroom is block-work, rendered and scored to look like stonework; as a whole one can be confident it would not get any architectural awards…). Similarly, the assertion that the existing building is a much-needed social amenity (despite the fact that scarcely anyone did use it, and Helmdon has three good quality amenities already in the Reading Rooms, the Primary School and the Parish Church) would astonish anyone well-informed in the village. Other reasons for rejection, ones that an architect could take into account, were dealt with in succeeding applications, but with each application new reasons for rejection were produced for the Planning Committee. The most serious of these was the Case Officer of the Planning Department's assertion that there is nothing seriously wrong with the building and it can easily be repaired. This was made despite no one from the Planning Department asking to see inside the locked building, or to inspect its defective wall (which cannot be seen from the road). The assertion conflicts with the Surveyor's Report and ignores the fact that the necessary remedial underpinning of the entire chapel would be very expensive. A further Planning Office objection was that the plot is more suited to one large house rather than two smaller ones This runs counter to the usual tenet that villages need affordable housing and, as the two houses proposed would still occupy less space than the existing Chapel and Schoolroom, it cannot be over-development of the site, as the Planning Department claimed. An objection that has featured increasingly in the rejections concerned part of the chapel wall at the rear that supports one end of the corrugated-iron roof of an outbuilding of an adjacent property. This happens to be on the perimeter of the plot of a listed building, so demolishing the Chapel wall will be "detrimental to a Listed Building". (Reader, take note! Anything "Listed" is inviolable, even an open-fronted lean-to with a very rusty roof - the Northampton lighthouse may just be "the exception that proves the rule".) From the above you can see that the owners and trustees of Helmdon Chapel have a difficult choice before them. They can make an expensive Detailed Proposal, but with the sinking feeling that "the powers that be" will again reject it, producing fresh reasons for doing so, if necessary. Or they can "go to appeal", which is also an expensive process. The Chapel's owners think they have been hard done by, a feeling that was reinforced for them at the last meeting of the Planning Committee when their third application was hurriedly voted-out after the Chapel's architect succinctly presented a detailed rebuttal of each of the Planning Office's reasons for recommending rejection. No response was made to any of the facts he presented or to the questions he asked. Instead the Chairman, who seemed surprised by the course of events, quickly put it to a vote and it was again rejected. Given the entrenched antipathy of the Planning Department's Case Officer and the Planning Committee, even if the Chapel's owners were to be successful on appeal, there is no certainty that the Council's Planners would not raise further objections when Detailed Planning Approval was sought. So, for the owners of the Helmdon Chapel, this is a pause, a time for reflection. We are open to ideas and suggestions. Meanwhile, we apologise to the residents of village for the state of the disused Chapel; we are aware that it is deteriorating, but it is not worth us spending anything on its maintenance when it has no future. Glyn Jones - Weston Baptists

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