Saving the cemetery chapel

I HAVE LIVED in Bourne for most of my life and after retiring in 2007, I decided that it was time to repay the town for my enjoyment of living here, the place where I have raised and educated my family. It was with this in mind that I attended a meeting of the action group formed to save the Victorian chapel in the town cemetery when it was threatened with demolition and was immediately enthusiastic that this was a project for me.

After an initial meeting in January 2008, I found myself elected leader of the group and we soon realised that there was a wider interest amongst those present and decided to form a preservation society. By April 2008, we were the fully constituted Bourne Preservation Society with an elected committee and myself as chairman and we soon had our own web site up and running, a significant achievement in such a short time.

A council survey had been conducted and the outcome was that the town council invited proposals from interested parties wishing to save the chapel to be with them one week before a public meeting to discuss it on 29th April 2008. We presented our proposal and everything was looking positive. We had enthusiastic members, ours was the only group to table a proposal and were tremendously proud of our progress in such a short space of time. All that was needed was money . . . or so we thought.

The final ten years of my working life were spent as a customer relations manager with a very large IT services contract to a major UK financial group and so I felt that I possessed the necessary skills to engage productively with the town council. But I could not have been more wrong. At meetings and in discussions, we found the majority of councillors to be dominant and inflexible, unwilling to engage in partnership and seeming to be unaware of the obligations of their role as councillors. In fact, anyone whose view was not their view, was not welcome.

Remember that most of these councillors were in place whilst they allowed the chapel to deteriorate over a period of over 30 years due to the lack of any effective working practices to inspect or maintain the building culminating with their almost unanimous vote to demolish it in January 2007, again due to their lack of understanding of the building, its requirements or its historical importance to the town and county.

Fortunately, English Heritage intervened and the chapel was listed Grade II in April 2007, thereby preventing the council from carrying out that proposal. They are the legal owners of the building and now have a responsibility to maintain it to a certain standard, the cost of which must be borne by the council tax paying public in Bourne. The society has been promised much in writing by the council but to this date has received not one penny from them, attaching conditions allowing them to escape their written obligation.

Our council is cash rich and at the end of the financial year 2009-10 they carried forward over £157,000, more than 50% of their total budget for the year, and this followed a carry forward of over £140,000 in 2008-09. At least £60,000 is in the cemetery development fund and has been there for several years. How can this be acceptable when they have avoided their responsibilities so acutely over the cemetery chapel? The building survey in July 2007, paid for by taxpayers at the request of the council, which incidentally was the only one they got, contained recommendations that immediate repairs had to be effected but none of these have been implemented to the detriment of the building yet the cash in hand continues to grow.

In November 2009, we commenced what was to be a series of meetings, held approximately every six weeks, to move the project forward. The agreed method would be an invitation to all councillors who were interested to attend with representatives from the society and alternate responsibility for chairing the proceedings. There have been five such meetings so far and they have been progressing well with both sides appearing to be satisfied with the real progress made and this has resulted in the society now engaging an architect and a solicitor.

In May of 2010, we formed Bourne Preservation Trust, a private company limited by guarantee and currently being registered as a charity which will operate in addition to the society, as a revolving building preservation trust. This will enable us to take control of buildings, restore and re-use them because we have another historic property in mind to follow the chapel project. We are also members of the UK Association of Preservation Trusts.

Just as everything falls into place, when both parties were making good progress and the society had committed financially to that progress, we again find ourselves on the receiving end of more antagonistic action by some members of the council, to delay or derail the project. The latest proposed action “to withdraw from bi-partisan control of meetings” is completely unnecessary and will contribute nothing to the project other than further delay and increased tension and we therefore wonder whether it really is the intention of the town council to move the project forward.

We have worked with Heritage Lincolnshire and the Architectural Heritage Fund who have both given presentations to the council and who support the project along with many others including the Victorian Society. Many individuals and societies have offered help to the council yet none have ever received that call from them.

Photographed in August 2010

Since May of this year, the trust has carried out, with council approval, over 110 hours of manual labour to clear the area around the chapel to help prevent further deterioration of the building. We have cleared disused brick structures and other buildings, removed all the ivy which has caused much damage, from the building, cut down shrubbery and trimmed trees, all at no charge to the council. The chapel is now visible when you enter the cemetery and the south wall now looks magnificent and can be seen in its entirety for the first time in over 70 years.

The society has done much good work over the past two and a half years to enable the project to continue and we have been consistent and honest in our discussions. We have suffered many unnecessary setbacks, but we will not give up. It is the stated policy of the government, previous and current, and the county council, that these old building be saved, wherever possible, and handed over to societies or trusts, such as ours, to ensure their survival..

Bourne Town Council has no plans to use the building again whereas an opportunity now exists yet the handover has still not been completed after more than two years of negotiation. Bourne Preservation Trust offers a cost-free solution to restoring and re-opening the chapel for the benefit of the town and for posterity. That is our aim. That is our intention.

WRITTEN AUGUST 2010

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