A CHURCH in East Oxford is to reopen tomorrow after a six-month £150,000 refurbishment programme.

SS Mary and John Church, in Cowley Road, will celebrate its reopening at its festival of dedication at 10.30am.

The Rev Adam Romanis, vicar at the church, said it was the end of a major phase of improvements to the church - but would mark the beginning of another.

He said: "This is part of a programme that started with addressing the churchyard which began back in 1999 when we started looking at the churchyard."

That work involved improving the church grounds - which had become the haunt of drug users. Volunteers hacked back undergrowth and removed syringe needles.

The latest work has included the installation of new lighting and heating, wood-worm treatment throughout the church and the construction of a new porch providing the main entrance on the Cowley Road side of the building.

Mr Romanis said: "What we are trying to do is make our wonderful 19th-century premises suitable physically for 21st-century needs.

"We haven't altered any of the main features of the interior of the building and we don't intend to because it is absolutely fine and needs to be left as it is.

"What we have tried to do with our churchyard work and the work at the front, with the new porch, is move the church closer to Cowley Road and make it part of it.

"We have tried to give it a shop front on the road."

"Previously it has looked rather forbidding and we want to give the opposite impression, - with the door open so people can wander in as much as is possible."

Mr Romanis said work had been paid for with a bequest to the church and some "generous" donations.

Now Mr Romanis and church staff will be going back to the drawing board for the second phase of work to the church - including deciding what to do with the organ, which has been rendered out of action by treatment for woodworm.