Churches and local residents in Camberley have denounced plans to demolish an old Victorian school and build a large Saudi-style mosque in the town.
Before buying the old Victorian school in London Road, Camberley’s Muslim community congregated in church and school halls for their activities. However, when St Gregory’s Roman Catholic School vacated the building it was using in 1996, the town’s Muslims saw a chance to demolish the school and erect a large Saudi-style mosque in its place.
The plans however have sparked outrage and large opposition from local residents since the Muslim Bengali Welfare Association launched its planning application in September 2009 which said that the area’s growing Muslim population needs a purpose-built mosque.
The Association bought the site with the help of Kuwaiti billionaire Jassim Al-Kharafi, paying £300,000 to the diocese of Brighton and Arundel.
The new mosque is planned to be built in a traditional Arabic style with a large central dome surrounded by five smaller domes and two 100ft minarets. It would have a 2,500sq-ft prayer hall, which would be able to be partitioned during the week and used as classrooms to teach children. The mosque would also have a morgue in the basement for washing and changing facilities for men and women.
English Heritage, a non-departmental public body of the Government with a broad remit of managing the historic built environment of England, has said it is against the mosque plan.
John Denham, MP for Southampton Itchen and Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, has also said he is thinking to support local residents if Surrey Heath Borough Council votes in favour of the application.
The Rev Mark Chester, chairman of Churches Together and vicar of St Paul’s Church, stated they are not against a mosque but the plans seem to serve a different purpose.
‘It is vitally important that a new-build mosque, or a place of worship for any faith, is appropriate to its setting rather than something clearly imported from a quite different culture.
‘I think it is fair to say that a mosque with two 100ft minarets and a large elevated dome is making not so much a spiritual, as a powerful cultural, or even political statement,’ he said.
Alan Kirkland, from the Save Our School group, which is also opposing the plans, said many people in the borough would want to attend in order to resist the plans. He said the campaign had gathered more than 2,000 signatures on a petition against the mosque over the past couple of weeks.
‘This is an issue to people in Chobham and Heatherside [as well as Camberley].
‘And it is not just about the knocking down of this old building but also the contempt the councillors on the planning committee seem to have for their electorate,’ he said.
The vote and subsequent decision on the mosque will be taken by 40 councillors on 10 March 2010 at 7pm.
The controversial proposals have provoked such a strong reaction from the locals that the meeting is scheduled to be held at the Camberley Theatre in order to allow 380 people to attend, Get Surrey has reported.
The Victorian school, which was built in 1871, sits in Surrey Heath Borough Council’s Royal Military Academy architectural conservation area, making it a locally listed building. When it was first opened it was known as Yorktown School and was part of a wave of school building after primary education was made compulsory in 1870.