Twelve neighbours objected. A church hall extended, reordered, and given a basement.
The reordered hall and its new servery, shown dressed as a community cafe. An illustrative fit-out, not a consented use and not built: the consent is for the extension, the basement and the internal reordering.
A former Gospel Hall on a tight backland plot between listed neighbours, taken on at sketch stage and carried through to permission.
The church itself is not listed. Four of its immediate neighbours are.
Christ Church has worshipped on Priory Terrace for generations, and its hall, the former Gospel Hall, had stopped keeping up: too few seats for the way the room was being used, a dated kitchen, and nowhere near enough storage.
The committee wanted a larger hall with a proper stage, a servery, accessible facilities and real storage, without harming a building that sits among listed neighbours in a conservation area.
About eighteen months from instruction to permission, through a flood-risk information request, a change of case officer, and twelve objections that sent it to committee.
In a flood zone, a basement is the hard way.
An above-ground store would have been cheaper and simpler, and on a Flood Zone 2 site it would have been easier to defend. The committee wanted the basement. Our job was to make it work, not to argue them out of it.
Discuss your site
Four constraints at once: a conservation area with listed neighbours on both sides, Flood Zone 2, a backland plot with no parking and a shared access, and twelve objections already on the file.
This is one of the most constrained sites in central Leamington. The church holds a long, narrow plot running the full block from Priory Terrace back to Church Terrace, hemmed by dwellings on both sides, with a narrow shared access and no parking. The church itself is not listed, but it stands among neighbours that are, including a Grade II* church and two Grade II houses on the same terrace. The site also sits in Flood Zone 2, so the council would not determine the application until a formal Flood Risk Assessment had been produced and agreed.
Against that, the brief asked for a subterranean basement. On a flood-zone site that is the hard way to add space: an above-ground store would have been cheaper, simpler and easier to argue. The committee felt strongly about it. We took the view that our job was to make the basement work rather than to talk the congregation out of the thing they had asked for, so the design problem became a fire problem: how to get people out of a room below ground, in a building whose only escape routes ran through the hall above. The answer was a lobbied stair kept separate from the hall, discharging through a new external door.
Twelve neighbour objections meant the decision was never going to be quiet, and the application went to committee. It also ran long: about eighteen months from instruction to permission, through the flood-risk request and a change of case officer part way through the determination. On 21 May 2024 the committee voted to grant, in line with the officer's recommendation, and the notice was issued the next day, conditioned on a Construction Management Plan, materials matching the existing, and the basement staying in ancillary storage use.
We redesigned the ground floor around the brief and held the application together to a committee vote.
The ground floor was redesigned completely, not adjusted.
All the new work is at the back or below ground, where the street cannot see it.
Eighteen months, a change of case officer, and a committee vote to grant.
Tell us about your project
A Senior Architect will reply. We will give you an initial appraisal and guide you as to what to do next.