Photo: Frank Blackwell
What to do with a Town Centre Churchyard
A question from a parish in Slough:
We have a large, town-centre churchyard crossed by footpaths, with several secluded areas of trees and shrubs, which are often used as somewhere to sleep by homeless people. It has been suggested to us as churchwardens that we should prevent this, and we have become aware that a couple of members of our congregation have either forcibly ejected people from the churchyard, or called the police.
However, we want to take a more positively Christian approach. We want to provide some suggestions/guidelines for those who are in and around our church throughout the week. So, for example, we would want someone to call the police if there was drug dealing going on in the churchyard - but would like to encourage a different approach if we discover a drug addict has taken up residence in our trees (we have an excellent drug abuse centre nearby). I envisage us providing a list of organisations to whom we can signpost vulnerable people - for night shelter, mental health, drug abuse, domestic violence, asylum concerns etc (Slough is well-provided), but would also like to provide some advice on best practice in these situations. If there is any information available from the diocese, we would very much like to access it.
An answer from a parish in Oxford:
The churchyard around the parish church of SS Mary & John on the Cowley Road, Oxford, goes back to the pioneering ministry of Revd Fr Richard Benson, first parish priest of Cowley St John (the official name of the parish) in the second half of the 19th century.
The churchyard, more or less 2 acres in extent, was clearly allowed to 'go wild' in the years after the Second World War, to the point where in the 1980s, it looked and felt abandoned to whatever nature could do with it, so that even parish members never tried to penetrate beyond the area immediately around the actual church building, which was kept more or less tidy. But this meant that over the years it was in fact 'colonized' to a limited and hidden extent by - especially - homeless people looking for a reasonably comfortable and quiet corner to sleep in, and drug-takers (and presumably drug-pushers) for hidden corners to pursue their trade and do their injections.
This came to the point, in 1998/9, where the local police felt they had to face the parish with the possibility of a court order to clear up the churchyard. So the parish, although in an interregnum, decided it really must get to work on it. With the help of the police we were able to invite in a working party of young soldiers in the 'pioneer regiment' (just back from Kosovo, glad to have something entirely 'homely' to be doing!) who began to clear away some of the worst over-growth, and took especial delight in discovering and re-ordering several 'war graves' - which have all along been paid for by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. This all gave us a good start in what has become at least a five-year project (probably more like ten) to manage it as an open wild-lfe conservation area, with visitbility maintained right through the churchyard. It will certainly continue to need a relatively high level of care which the City Council is unlikely to be able to give it on their own. One unexpected and positive aspect of the project is that occasionally some of the people who once hung around the church yard join in the volunteer work.
Already well before any restoration of the churchyard was in view, the Sisters in the Convent next door had opened a 'drop-in' room for the homeless, which was being pretty well used. As they reflected on this, they thought they could do something even more directly useful, and have transformed and extended a house they own in Magdalen Road (which runs along the Eastern edge of the entire plot) into what is now known as the 'Steppin' Stone'. This is a 'membership' place where homeless people, especially those relatively young (who, I believe form a high proportion of those who have been sleeping out in Oxford - although the City Council has had a vigorous campaign to reduce the numbers of those literally sleeping out for several years now), can 'join' for a tiny fee, use the bathroom(s) and washing machine(s), get a meal or two (and learn to cook them) and take some training opportunities on a set of computers in the upstairs rooms, with a view to future employment. Oxford also has - linked of course with the City Council's efforts to reduce to an absolute minimum the number of rough sleepers - several 'night shelters’ and programmes, mostly in the city center. So I hope it is true to say that while the restoration efforts in our churchyard have undoubtedly discouraged and eventually succeeded in moving on all the homeless who used to sleep there, they have the possibility of finding reasonably friendly and helpful alternatives.
Much more difficult has been the matter of the drug-takers and -pushers. There is evidently quite a lot of drug-taking going on around this area. In the clearing up of the churchyard several hundred needles were discovered in the undergrowth, and even after some three years of pretty intensive 'clearing-up' efforts we still need to watch out for needles. The community’s police, who include a team who move around the area on bikes, keep a fairly close eye on our churchyard, often ride through it - especially since it, with much else in the surrounding neighbourhood, has become an 'alcohol-free zone'. I think it is true by now to say that on the whole we are no longer aware of people regularly or deliberately taking advantage of the comparative quiet of the churchyard to use it for drug-trafficking.
We would warmly recommend to other parishes planning such restorations that at least the churchwardens (or other responsibly delegated people from the parish concerned) arrange a meeting with the relevant community police for the area, along with any local government services connected with the drug and homeless scenes in the locality, to bring each other up to date with each others' efforts and see what sort of cross-information channels for fairly regular consultation and decision-making can be found or brought into being. A leaflet outlining the various services and how each can best be contacted would surely be useful for giving out to those who use the churchyard for lack of anything better, but it will also help if there can be people with time to meet and talk to those who could use the leaflet.
(Dr) Martin Conway
Chairman of the Diocesan Board for Social Responsibility
