I have visited my St. Nicholas Church local patch site for many years now but much more intensively since March 2020 when travel restrictions imposed due to the Covid-19 pandemic forced me to “stay local”.
In the last year or so, anti-social behaviour around the church seems to have increased.
During my visits during the day, principally early mornings, I rarely see anyone other than an occasional dog walker or people attending graves.
However, what I do see fairly frequently is evidence of what has occurred the night before i.e. empty alcohol bottles, nitrous oxide canisters and an assortment of other rubbish.
Even worse has been the reports of vandalism of graves and some of the seats around the church …. see here and here.
St. Nicholas Church is an exceptionally old and historical building and the cemetery and the wider area around it is both lovely for a peaceful walk and to watch the local wildlife.
For some reason, mindless idiots seem to take great joy in trashing it and showing complete and utter disrespect towards those buried there.
I visited the site on many evenings last spring and summer to watch the Badgers and Red Foxes and I have just started to do so again. On most of those visits there was no-one around whilst on some of them there were just a few people quietly watching the sunset. Occasionally, however, when I arrived on site, there were groups of youths hanging around behind the church and the noise, let alone anything else, was enough to send me straight back home.
Some months ago, I spoke to Andrei, the vicar at St. Nicholas Church, and he was hoping to source funding to install CCTV and lighting to act as a deterrent and to potentially assist prosecution.
It now appears that he has been successful in securing Essex County Council grant funding to implement these security measures …. St. Nicholas Church to install CCTV
Hopefully, this will have the desired effect and deter and prevent anti-social behaviour. In doing so, it will also increase my opportunities of seeing some of the nocturnal wildlife that undoubtedly is being disturbed by the noise on some evenings.
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