St Peter, Leeds, West Yorkshire
As with the town in which it sits, Leeds Parish Church is vast, grand, interesting, and probably not right away likeable. But like the city alone, the church soon reveals its friendliness and idiosyncrasies to them as are organized to just take it as they uncover it.
St Peter is one of the fantastic city parish churches of England. Construction commenced in 1837, a handful of weeks after the accession of the younger Queen. It was the very first big creating undertaking in the freshly established Diocese of Ripon, which had been carved out of the Archdiocese of York, and what a venture it was. At first it was planned as a large mend occupation on the 14th Century church which beforehand stood on this website. The architect was Robert Chantrell. Even so, it turned apparent to Chantrell that a entire rebuilding was required, and so it transpired. The new church was finished in time for opening in 1841. The price was a tiny brief of £30,000, about 6 million in today’s cash, which will not look a great deal but of training course labour was proportionately so much much less expensive then than nowadays. And not only was St Peter the initially excellent church of the Victorian era, it was also the most significant church crafted in England for much more than a century, due to the fact Sir Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral in London.
The setting up went up at the behest of the Vicar of Leeds, Walter Hook. Famously, his sole instruction to Chantrell was that the church really should be ‘big adequate to keep as several individuals as possible’. But this is no preaching barn, simply because Hook was an early follower of the Oxford Motion, and his church was supposed to offer a sacramental room as properly as an evangelising 1, which explains its totally Gothic model – Hook and Chantrell had been rejecting the protestant-most popular Classical sorts of the early 19th Century. Without a doubt, as properly as St Peter, Hook’s principal legacy to 19th Century Leeds would be the suburban mission church buildings in the Higher Church custom which he planted in the poorer places of the metropolis.
Amid 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 one more early adherent to the Movement, the 20 calendar year previous Florence Nightingale.
To see the church that Chantrell developed you need to have to stand on the sanctuary ways hunting west, with your back to the altar, for George Street refashioned the east end in the 1870s in the thorough High Church manner of that time, with marble by Salviati of Venice and his individual reredos. The glass earlier mentioned is gathered Flemish glass. Your principal effect on the lookout into the nave will be of large dim wood, for the 1841 St Peter was in essence continue to a item of the Georgian era, and it retains its elaborately carved galleries on a few sides of the nave, as very well as an massive pulpit which sweeps higher up into area. Of fantastic interest way too is the stained glass in the south aisle and west conclusion, for like the woodwork it extensively predates the ecclesiological motion that the following decade or so would provide.
The church is cruciform, but this is not immediately evident because of the way transepts and aisles have been hived off for use as chapels and the like. The good tower sits over the north transept, which varieties an entrance spot. The chancel aisle to the east of it varieties a war memorial chapel, the outer north nave aisle now has a cafe. Even with the size of the church, the woodwork and divisions can make it feel fairly a cluttered put.
Walter Hook lies in effigy atop a tomb in the north chancel chapel in the medieval vogue. In fact, if you did not know, you may possibly take him for a 14th Century prelate. But there are in simple fact a few of survivals which predate the Victorian church, like 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 after this the Diocese of Ripon was submerged alongside with the Dioceses of Bradford and Wakefield into the recently shaped Diocese of Leeds in 2014. The new Diocese, the major in England, at present has three cathedrals of equal standing at Ripon, Bradford and Wakefield, but there are long term strategies for a new cathedral in the great city at the heart of the Diocese, and as component of these it is regarded as that Leeds Minster, Leeds Parish Church as was, could just take on the status of a professional-cathedral.
This, I believe, would be a pity, for this remarkable regenerated city warrants a little something superior, anything large and wholly new that would be as significantly a beacon for 21st Century Anglicanism as St Peter was for the 19th Century. Leeds is a person of the most important towns in Europe without having a Cathedral for its national church – Dublin and Berlin also spring to thoughts. No, that new Cathedral demands to be elsewhere in the metropolis centre. As the role of Anglicanism in English tradition shifts and adjustments, so St Peter gets to be considerably less helpful as a flagship, and deserves to return to the muscular, sleeves-rolled-up parochial do the job for which Walter Hook meant it.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2017-11-08 06:44:35
Tagged: , Leeds , Minster , west , yorkshire , nikon , d5300 , yorks
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