The Church Times reports on the petitioning last week from St Mary’s Church, Wendover to the Hybrid Bill Select Committee.
They say:
A CHURCH near Aylesbury has described a £250,000 offer of noise-reduction work from the promoters of the High Speed 2 (HS2) rail link as “woefully inadequate”, saying that it needs to carry out work costing in the region of £2 million to mitigate the noise from the trains.
… in evidence given this week, the members of the congregation said that the changes would “not solve noise problems”. And they argued that the noise from the trains would be “fatal” for concerts that take place at the church.
William Avery, who, according to his petition, “leads the music and is deeply involved in the fabric of the building and technology in the church”, told the committee that a breakdown of the figure provided by HS2 included £68,200 to provide secondary glazing to 12 clerestory and 15 stained-glass windows. “That equates to £2500 a window, which is just a ridiculously low figure,” he said.
He also criticised HS2’s proposals for the installation of sound installation boards inside the church’s roof. Instead, the roof should be rebuilt, he said, with the panels on the outside; the installation of the panels underneath the roof would “create dew-point problems [the temperature at which dew forms], which would result in rotting of the roof, which is obviously completely unacceptable”.
This solution was also “unacceptable from a heritage point of view”, he said, because, “if you put the sound insulation on the inside, it’s between the joists, and you’ll lose the profile of the roof on the inside of the building.” He argued that the DAC would “be vehemently against that approach”.
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