The petitioners sought a faculty to build disabled toilets, a kitchen area, an upper-floor meeting room and a drainage system in this Grade I listed church. This would require removing a step from the font and four box pews from the west end of the nave. The proposed works had taken ten years of planning by the parochial church council. English Heritage, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and the Diocesan Advisory Committee had no objections to the proposals. However, the Georgian Group did not believe that the box pews should be removed, arguing that toilet facilities could be located in the churchyard. Following a site visit it was found that the churchyard did not provide an appropriate location for toilets. Alternative suggestions of locating the facilities in the boiler room were also impractical because of cost and the consequential need to re-locate the boiler. There was no dispute that the church's mission and wider public benefit required the installation of accessible facilities both for congregants and for wider community use. It was found that the essential features of the church would be unaffected by the scheme. The impact on the architectural heritage would be small and the scheme might even provide the benefit of a less cluttered appearance. The disputed pews were not in their original condition in any event, owing to adaptations that pre-dated the modern faculty jurisdiction. The small loss to the architectural heritage was outweighed by the public benefit provided both by the toilet facilities and by the other proposed works. Accordingly the faculty was granted. [Catherine Shelley]