Save Britain’s Heritage (SAVE) has failed in its High Court bid to block the demolition of a Victorian schoolhouse in the Herefordshire village of Garway.
The campaign group has been fighting for two years to save the unlisted building which was built in the Gothic style in 1877.
SAVE says it is a good example of a so-called “board school” made up of a schoolhouse with an adjoining residence for a headteacher. As most board schools are in cities, the charity says this is a rare rural example.
They also say it is one of the village’s last remaining historic buildings.
In April this year, Herefordshire County Council gave the building’s owner permission to demolish the building under permitted development rights.
SAVE challenged the decision at a court hearing earlier this month. Lawyers for the campaign group argued that permitted development rights don’t apply in this case as the owner had allowed the building to become uninhabitable by failing to maintain it.
Specifically, they refer to a line in a report written by a planning inspector for the council. The report said of the building “while it may not be habitable in its current condition”.
This, their lawyers argued, is evidence the building had been allowed to fall into disrepair and become uninhabitable due to neglect by the owner.
In her ruling, handed down today, planning judge Mrs Justice Lang disagreed.
She said the planning inspector who wrote a report on the building didn’t make an “unequivocal” finding that the building was uninhabitable.
“I do not accept the claimant’s submission that in the report of 3 December 2021, the officer made a finding that the school was uninhabitable,” she said.
“On my reading of the report, he was raising this as a hypothesis or possibility, in response to the objections that had been made. In my view, if the officer had found that the school was uninhabitable he would have made an unequivocal finding to that effect, in all three reports, as he was clearly well aware that the first limb of the statutory test was that the building had been ‘rendered unsafe or uninhabitable’.”
Therefore, she said, as the owner had not rendered the building uninhabitable, he should not lose permitted development rights.
“The claim for judicial review is dismissed,” she ruled.
The King on the Application of Save Britain’s Heritage – and – Herefordshire County Council; Gerard Davies
Planning Court (Lang J) 25 November 2022
