St Peter and St Paul in Brockdish is carrying out a repair project on its nave roof after becoming the first church within the Diocese of Norwich to be awarded a grant from the Minor Repairs and Improvements Fund.
The rural parish, seven miles from the market town of Diss, received £5,000 in support of a scheme to make the historic building watertight.
Churchwarden Jan Croxson BEM played a pivotal role in making the successful funding application, which paid for more than half of a project totalling almost £10,000.
Jan, who has been a member of the St Peter and St Paul church community for 45 years, said:
“It’s pretty amazing, because without it we couldn’t have completed the work – and put it towards the other work we’re about to undertake.
“It was so easy peasy, it didn’t even feel as though I’d filled a grant form in. It was amazing compared to some of the others I’ve been faced with. I would strongly encourage anybody to apply for this grant.”
The award, combined with money raised through community fundraising, has enabled St Peter and St Paul to carry out ‘patch-and-darning’ roof repairs rather than large-scale works that would have cost hundreds of thousands of pounds.
To mark the first of many Minor Repairs and Improvements Fund grants having been awarded, Tim Sweeting, Diocesan Secretary of the Diocese of Norwich, visited the church and presented Jan with a certificate.
Discussing why the Minor Repairs and Improvements Fund is so integral to the Diocesan strategy of supporting churches in making repairs of this kind as early as possible, Tim said:
“We’ve got such a fantastic array of Grade I* and II* listed churches in this Diocese, but they’re expensive to be able to upkeep properly. We want to make sure we can do the little repairs in order to make sure that they don’t require much, much bigger repairs in the future.”