St Peter, Leeds, West Yorkshire
As with the town in which it sits, Leeds Parish Church is extensive, grand, interesting, and most likely not promptly likeable. But like the town itself, the church before long reveals its friendliness and idiosyncrasies to them as are prepared to acquire it as they find it.
St Peter is one particular of the excellent urban parish church buildings of England. Building commenced in 1837, a few months immediately after the accession of the youthful Queen. It was the 1st big setting up undertaking in the recently designed Diocese of Ripon, which had been carved out of the Archdiocese of York, and what a venture it was. At to start with it was planned as a massive fix occupation on the 14th Century church which formerly stood on this site. The architect was Robert Chantrell. Even so, it became crystal clear to Chantrell that a full rebuilding was needed, and so it happened. The new church was concluded in time for opening in 1841. The price was a tiny small of £30,000, about six million in today’s cash, which does not seem a large amount but of study course labour was proportionately so considerably cheaper then than right now. And not only was St Peter the initially good church of the Victorian period, it was also the major church created in England for much more than a century, considering that Sir Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral in London.
The building went up at the behest of the Vicar of Leeds, Walter Hook. Famously, his sole instruction to Chantrell was that the church need to be ‘big adequate to maintain as a lot of folks as possible’. But this is no preaching barn, since Hook was an early follower of the Oxford Movement, and his church was meant to offer a sacramental house as properly as an evangelising just one, which explains its entirely Gothic design – Hook and Chantrell had been rejecting the protestant-desired Classical types of the early 19th Century. Certainly, as effectively as St Peter, Hook’s main legacy to 19th Century Leeds would be the suburban mission church buildings in the Superior Church tradition which he planted in the poorer regions of the city.
Amid the congregation for the opening on 2nd September 1841 was Edward Pusey, a single of the leaders of the Oxford Movement. Also there that day was another early adherent to the Movement, the 20 12 months aged Florence Nightingale.
To see the church that Chantrell constructed you will need to stand on the sanctuary actions looking west, with your back again to the altar, for George Street refashioned the east conclusion in the 1870s in the comprehensive Superior Church fashion of that time, with marble by Salviati of Venice and his possess reredos. The glass over is collected Flemish glass. Your key impact searching into the nave will be of significant dark wood, for the 1841 St Peter was primarily even now a product or service of the Georgian period, and it retains its elaborately carved galleries on a few sides of the nave, as nicely as an great pulpit which sweeps substantial up into space. Of great fascination far too is the stained glass in the south aisle and west finish, for like the woodwork it extensively predates the ecclesiological movement that the following decade or so would deliver.
The church is cruciform, but this is not straight away noticeable since of the way transepts and aisles have been hived off for use as chapels and the like. The wonderful tower sits higher than the north transept, which forms an entrance area. The chancel aisle to the east of it sorts a war memorial chapel, the outer north nave aisle now incorporates a cafe. In spite of the dimension of the church, the woodwork and divisions can make it appear rather a cluttered put.
Walter Hook lies in effigy atop a tomb in the north chancel chapel in the medieval style. Certainly, if you didn’t know, you could just take him for a 14th Century prelate. But there are in fact a pair of survivals which predate the Victorian church, including the painted Hardwick tomb of the late 17th Century on the south side of the chancel.
In 2011, St Peter was rebadged as Leeds Minster, but soon right after this the Diocese of Ripon was submerged together with the Dioceses of Bradford and Wakefield into the newly fashioned Diocese of Leeds in 2014. The new Diocese, the greatest in England, currently has three cathedrals of equivalent status at Ripon, Bradford and Wakefield, but there are very long time period ideas for a new cathedral in the terrific metropolis at the coronary heart of the Diocese, and as component of these it is deemed that Leeds Minster, Leeds Parish Church as was, may well get on the position of a professional-cathedral.
This, I believe, would be a pity, for this extraordinary regenerated city justifies one thing much better, a thing massive and wholly new that would be as a great deal a beacon for 21st Century Anglicanism as St Peter was for the 19th Century. Leeds is 1 of the largest metropolitan areas in Europe without a Cathedral for its national church – Dublin and Berlin also spring to mind. No, that new Cathedral demands to be elsewhere in the town centre. As the role of Anglicanism in English tradition shifts and alterations, so St Peter becomes significantly less practical as a flagship, and justifies to return to the muscular, sleeves-rolled-up parochial operate for which Walter Hook intended it.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2017-11-08 19:06:43
Tagged: , Leeds , West , Yorkshire , yorks , church , nikon , d5300
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