'Selling the cross is immoral'

When the vicar of St Barnabas Church in Beckenham gave permission for a mobile phone company to build a mast inside a cross on his roof, it caused outrage among the local community.

A campaign to have the plans scrapped was led by actor Eric Richard, who played Sergeant Bob Cryer in the ITV series The Bill.

The church would have received around £3,000 a year from Hutchison 3G to conceal the transmitter in a fibreglass cross. But the Rev Peter Marr relented when at least six of his parishioners left in disgust and he received floods of complaints.

Mr Richard, 62, said: "I'm not a Christian and I don't belong to any organised religious group but I think selling the symbol of Christianity, of God on Earth, is the height of hypocrisy, immoral and obscene. If it's okay to make money out of the cross, maybe they could hire out the vestry to sell drugs there. It's not a not-in-my-backyard situation. This is an issue which is affecting lots of people."

Mr Richard also said the church was near a school and it was still unclear if emissions from phone masts were harmful or not.

He added: "The vicar said the Church believed the project to be safe but the Government would not be spending millions of pounds researching what effect radiation has if that was so."

Mother-of-two Julia Smeulders, whose children attend the school, said: "They could be risking children's health just for cash and I wouldn't have thought a church could do that."