St Peter, Leeds, West Yorkshire
As with the town in which it sits, Leeds Parish Church is wide, grand, intriguing, and potentially not right away likeable. But like the city alone, the church soon reveals its friendliness and idiosyncrasies to them as are well prepared to just take it as they come across it.
St Peter is a single of the great urban parish churches of England. Design started in 1837, a number of months just after the accession of the younger Queen. It was the initial important building venture in the freshly created Diocese of Ripon, which had been carved out of the Archdiocese of York, and what a challenge it was. At to start with it was planned as a substantial restore job on the 14th Century church which earlier stood on this internet site. The architect was Robert Chantrell. Nonetheless, it turned crystal clear to Chantrell that a total rebuilding was essential, and so it took place. The new church was finished in time for opening in 1841. The charge was a small brief of £30,000, about 6 million in today’s revenue, which would not appear a great deal but of course labour was proportionately so substantially less expensive then than currently. And not only was St Peter the very first fantastic church of the Victorian period, it was also the major church designed 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 must be ‘big sufficient to hold as numerous men and women as possible’. But this is no preaching barn, because Hook was an early follower of the Oxford Movement, and his church was supposed to supply a sacramental area as perfectly as an evangelising a single, which points out its entirely Gothic type – Hook and Chantrell ended up rejecting the protestant-preferred Classical forms of the early 19th Century. In truth, as very well as St Peter, Hook’s major legacy to 19th Century Leeds would be the suburban mission church buildings in the Significant Church tradition which he planted in the poorer locations of the city.
Amongst the congregation for the opening on 2nd September 1841 was Edward Pusey, a person of the leaders of the Oxford Motion. Also there that working day was one more early adherent to the Motion, the 20 year outdated Florence Nightingale.
To see the church that Chantrell developed you want to stand on the sanctuary ways searching west, with your again to the altar, for George Avenue refashioned the east conclusion in the 1870s in the complete High Church trend of that time, with marble by Salviati of Venice and his very own reredos. The glass higher than is collected Flemish glass. Your key impression searching into the nave will be of weighty dim wooden, for the 1841 St Peter was basically nevertheless a products of the Georgian period, and it retains its elaborately carved galleries on a few sides of the nave, as perfectly as an enormous pulpit which sweeps large up into place. Of wonderful interest far too is the stained glass in the south aisle and west stop, for like the woodwork it thoroughly predates the ecclesiological motion that the upcoming 10 years or so would convey.
The church is cruciform, but this is not instantly obvious since 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 varieties an entrance location. The chancel aisle to the east of it forms a war memorial chapel, the outer north nave aisle now has a cafe. Irrespective of the sizing of the church, the woodwork and divisions can make it look fairly a cluttered area.
Walter Hook lies in effigy atop a tomb in the north chancel chapel in the medieval vogue. Without a doubt, if you failed to know, you may well consider him for a 14th Century prelate. But there are in reality a couple 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 quickly right after this the Diocese of Ripon was submerged together with the Dioceses of Bradford and Wakefield into the recently shaped Diocese of Leeds in 2014. The new Diocese, the most important in England, currently has three cathedrals of equivalent position at Ripon, Bradford and Wakefield, but there are long phrase options for a new cathedral in the excellent city at the heart of the Diocese, and as portion of these it is thought of that Leeds Minster, Leeds Parish Church as was, may possibly choose on the position of a professional-cathedral.
This, I consider, would be a pity, for this extraordinary regenerated city warrants a little something much better, anything large and wholly new that would be as considerably a beacon for 21st Century Anglicanism as St Peter was for the 19th Century. Leeds is one of the greatest cities in Europe without a Cathedral for its national church – Dublin and Berlin also spring to intellect. No, that new Cathedral requires to be somewhere else in the metropolis centre. As the job of Anglicanism in English tradition shifts and modifications, so St Peter gets much less helpful as a flagship, and deserves to return to the muscular, sleeves-rolled-up parochial get the job done for which Walter Hook intended it.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2017-11-07 18:21:30
Tagged: , Leeds , Minster , West , yorkshire , nikon , d5300 , yorks
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