St Peter, Leeds, West Yorkshire
As with the town in which it sits, Leeds Parish Church is vast, grand, interesting, and possibly not instantly likeable. But like the town alone, the church soon reveals its friendliness and idiosyncrasies to them as are prepared to just take it as they locate it.
St Peter is 1 of the terrific urban parish churches of England. Building commenced in 1837, a few months following the accession of the youthful Queen. It was the initially big developing venture in the newly made Diocese of Ripon, which experienced been carved out of the Archdiocese of York, and what a challenge it was. At initially it was planned as a huge mend occupation on the 14th Century church which previously stood on this web page. The architect was Robert Chantrell. Nevertheless, it became clear to Chantrell that a complete rebuilding was necessary, and so it transpired. The new church was concluded in time for opening in 1841. The charge was a little quick of £30,000, about 6 million in present day income, which doesn’t seem to be a good deal but of program labour was proportionately so substantially much less expensive then than nowadays. And not only was St Peter the to start with terrific church of the Victorian era, it was also the biggest church designed in England for a lot more than a century, because Sir Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral in London.
The creating 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 enough to hold as lots of individuals as possible’. But this is no preaching barn, because Hook was an early follower of the Oxford Motion, and his church was supposed to source a sacramental house as effectively as an evangelising a single, which points out its fully Gothic type – Hook and Chantrell were being rejecting the protestant-most popular Classical types of the early 19th Century. Certainly, as effectively as St Peter, Hook’s key legacy to 19th Century Leeds would be the suburban mission church buildings in the Superior Church custom which he planted in the poorer locations of the metropolis.
Among the the congregation for the opening on 2nd September 1841 was Edward Pusey, one particular of the leaders of the Oxford Movement. Also there that day was another early adherent to the Movement, the 20 12 months old Florence Nightingale.
To see the church that Chantrell built you require to stand on the sanctuary steps searching west, with your back again to the altar, for George Street refashioned the east finish in the 1870s in the thorough High Church fashion of that time, with marble by Salviati of Venice and his personal reredos. The glass over is gathered Flemish glass. Your principal impact on the lookout into the nave will be of large dark wooden, for the 1841 St Peter was essentially continue to a product of the Georgian period, and it retains its elaborately carved galleries on three sides of the nave, as well as an huge pulpit which sweeps significant up into space. Of good fascination way too is the stained glass in the south aisle and west end, for like the woodwork it thoroughly predates the ecclesiological motion that the upcoming decade or so would deliver.
The church is cruciform, but this is not immediately obvious for the reason that of the way transepts and aisles have been hived off for use as chapels and the like. The wonderful tower sits previously mentioned 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 consists of a cafe. Despite the dimension of the church, the woodwork and divisions can make it feel somewhat a cluttered put.
Walter Hook lies in effigy atop a tomb in the north chancel chapel in the medieval fashion. In truth, if you failed to know, you may possibly consider him for a 14th Century prelate. But there are in truth a few of survivals which predate the Victorian church, including the painted Hardwick tomb of the late 17th Century on the south aspect of the chancel.
In 2011, St Peter was rebadged as Leeds Minster, but quickly soon after this the Diocese of Ripon was submerged alongside with the Dioceses of Bradford and Wakefield into the freshly fashioned Diocese of Leeds in 2014. The new Diocese, the major in England, at present has three cathedrals of equivalent standing at Ripon, Bradford and Wakefield, but there are lengthy term strategies for a new cathedral in the great town at the heart of the Diocese, and as part of these it is viewed as that Leeds Minster, Leeds Parish Church as was, may well take on the position of a professional-cathedral.
This, I imagine, would be a pity, for this extraordinary regenerated metropolis deserves anything improved, anything big and wholly new that would be as considerably a beacon for 21st Century Anglicanism as St Peter was for the 19th Century. Leeds is a person of the largest metropolitan areas in Europe without having a Cathedral for its nationwide church – Dublin and Berlin also spring to brain. No, that new Cathedral desires to be somewhere else in the city centre. As the purpose of Anglicanism in English tradition shifts and modifications, so St Peter will become significantly less handy as a flagship, and deserves to return to the muscular, sleeves-rolled-up parochial get the job done for which Walter Hook supposed it.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2017-11-07 18:21:34
Tagged: , Leeds , Minster , West , yorkshire , nikon , d5300 , yorks
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