St Peter, Leeds, West Yorkshire
As with the metropolis in which it sits, Leeds Parish Church is large, grand, fascinating, and perhaps not straight away likeable. But like the city alone, the church before long reveals its friendliness and idiosyncrasies to them as are organized to acquire it as they obtain it.
St Peter is just one of the excellent city parish churches of England. Construction began in 1837, a couple months soon after the accession of the youthful Queen. It was the first important constructing job in the recently established Diocese of Ripon, which had been carved out of the Archdiocese of York, and what a project it was. At first it was prepared as a substantial maintenance occupation on the 14th Century church which formerly stood on this web-site. The architect was Robert Chantrell. Nevertheless, it became distinct to Chantrell that a complete rebuilding was necessary, and so it occurred. The new church was concluded in time for opening in 1841. The cost was a very little limited of £30,000, about six million in present-day income, which does not seem a great deal but of training course labour was proportionately so a lot cheaper then than now. And not only was St Peter the initial good church of the Victorian period, it was also the most important church crafted in England for additional than a century, due to the fact 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 should be ‘big ample to keep as numerous folks as possible’. But this is no preaching barn, due to the fact Hook was an early follower of the Oxford Movement, and his church was meant to provide a sacramental area as properly as an evangelising 1, which describes its fully Gothic model – Hook and Chantrell were being rejecting the protestant-most well-liked Classical forms of the early 19th Century. Certainly, as effectively as St Peter, Hook’s principal legacy to 19th Century Leeds would be the suburban mission churches in the Large Church tradition which he planted in the poorer locations of the metropolis.
Amongst the congregation for the opening on 2nd September 1841 was Edward Pusey, just one of the leaders of the Oxford Motion. Also there that working day was a further early adherent to the Movement, the 20 yr aged Florence Nightingale.
To see the church that Chantrell constructed you require to stand on the sanctuary measures wanting west, with your back to the altar, for George Avenue refashioned the east end in the 1870s in the comprehensive Significant Church vogue of that time, with marble by Salviati of Venice and his individual reredos. The glass over is gathered Flemish glass. Your principal impact wanting into the nave will be of major dim wooden, for the 1841 St Peter was fundamentally nevertheless a solution of the Georgian period, and it retains its elaborately carved galleries on a few sides of the nave, as very well as an enormous pulpit which sweeps large up into space. Of fantastic desire too is the stained glass in the south aisle and west close, for like the woodwork it extensively predates the ecclesiological movement that the next 10 years or so would convey.
The church is cruciform, but this is not instantly apparent due to the fact of the way transepts and aisles have been hived off for use as chapels and the like. The great tower sits earlier mentioned the north transept, which sorts an entrance place. The chancel aisle to the east of it types a war memorial chapel, the outer north nave aisle now consists of a cafe. Despite the sizing of the church, the woodwork and divisions can make it seem relatively a cluttered put.
Walter Hook lies in effigy atop a tomb in the north chancel chapel in the medieval style. Indeed, if you failed to know, you may take him for a 14th Century prelate. But there are in truth a couple of survivals which predate the Victorian church, together with 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 shortly immediately 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 biggest in England, at this time has 3 cathedrals of equal standing at Ripon, Bradford and Wakefield, but there are long term programs for a new cathedral in the fantastic town at the heart of the Diocese, and as portion of these it is considered that Leeds Minster, Leeds Parish Church as was, might just take on the standing of a professional-cathedral.
This, I assume, would be a pity, for this extraordinary regenerated metropolis warrants a thing far better, one thing significant and wholly new that would be as substantially a beacon for 21st Century Anglicanism as St Peter was for the 19th Century. Leeds is one of the biggest towns in Europe devoid of a Cathedral for its national church – Dublin and Berlin also spring to brain. No, that new Cathedral demands to be elsewhere in the city centre. As the job of Anglicanism in English culture shifts and modifications, so St Peter turns into much less practical as a flagship, and warrants to return to the muscular, sleeves-rolled-up parochial function for which Walter Hook intended it.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2017-11-08 06:44:31
Tagged: , Leeds , Minster , west , yorkshire , nikon , d5300 , yorks
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