A HERITAGE group’s court bid to save a Victorian village school from the bulldozers has failed.

Herefordshire Council gave the go ahead earlier this year for Wonastow farmer Gerard Davies to pull down the 145-year-old Garway Old School and replace it with hardstanding.

Save Britain’s Heritage then pursued a judicial review in the High Court, backed by residents who protested that it was cultural vandalism to demolish the rundown building, amid fears that a bid for new houses on the site would follow.

The council said they had no legal power to stop the demolition and allowed ‘permitted development’, despite Mr Davies having been granted permission in 2013 for the school to be turned into two homes, but not proceeded.

The farmer bought the building in 1981 after the school closed down, and it was later used as storage space for agricultural and commercial workshops on the site, while the school house was lived in until 1997.

SBH, which joined the campaign to save the 1877-built school two years ago, said it was “a perfect candidate for repair and reuse for housing”.

It backed a council bid to have it protected last year, but the move failed when Historic England declined to list it, as it wasn’t a nationally significant historic building, despite accepting it was of “historic interest as an early board school in a remote countryside location, and local interest for the connection of its architect EH Lingen Barker”.

Having rejected a first demolition bid a year ago on the grounds of a lack of information about the demolition process, the council then allowed the second application.

In their claim for a judicial review, SBH claimed permitted rights should not apply because the owner had let the building become “uninhabitable” by failing to maintain the site, which is now overgrown with vegetation.

Under permitted development rights, it has to be shown that a building has not been rendered unsafe or uninhabitable as a result of the owner’s own neglect.

But passing judgement at the High Court, Mrs Justice Lang said the planning officer was within his rights to conclude the building was “in a good structural condition” and hadn’t been “rendered unsafe or uninhabitable”.

The group also claimed the council failed to undertake the correct process in determining the application for demolition.

But the judge said the council didn’t have to explain the dates on which documents that were not decisions were issued or the reasons for any delays in issuing them.

Residents recently held a protest outside the school, which is one of rural community’s few historic buildings, alongside the Knight’s Templar church.

More than 100 objections were lodged against the successful planning bid to bulldoze the Victorian sandstone building.

Residents said a “concrete field” at the roadside opposite the modern community centre would be an “eyesore”, while there was no indication from the applicant about what he intended to do with the site in the long-term.

The Garway Community Centre group also weighed in, describing it as an “irreplaceable feature”.

And SBH conservation officer Benedict Oakley said earlier this year: “We object to the principle of demolishing these Victorian school buildings on heritage and environmental grounds…

“These buildings are non-designated heritage assets of considerable local architectural and historic significance which we consider to be perfectly suitable for conversion and reuse.”

The building is “one of the oldest surviving buildings in the village of Garway”, claimed the charity, which called any demolition a “disproportionate and unjustified response to managing these buildings”, that would also “carry a highly negative carbon cost”.