St Peter, Leeds, West Yorkshire
As with the town in which it sits, Leeds Parish Church is vast, grand, interesting, and potentially not immediately likeable. But like the town by itself, the church soon reveals its friendliness and idiosyncrasies to them as are well prepared to acquire it as they uncover it.
St Peter is a single of the terrific urban parish church buildings of England. Design commenced in 1837, a couple of months immediately after the accession of the younger Queen. It was the very first key setting up undertaking in the freshly made Diocese of Ripon, which experienced been carved out of the Archdiocese of York, and what a project it was. At initially it was prepared as a massive repair occupation on the 14th Century church which earlier stood on this site. The architect was Robert Chantrell. Even so, it turned clear to Chantrell that a finish rebuilding was required, and so it took place. The new church was concluded in time for opening in 1841. The price was a tiny limited of £30,000, about 6 million in present day income, which won’t appear to be a great deal but of system labour was proportionately so much cheaper then than nowadays. And not only was St Peter the initial good church of the Victorian era, it was also the greatest church built in England for 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 must be ‘big more than enough to keep as numerous persons 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 house as properly as an evangelising a single, which explains its fully Gothic fashion – Hook and Chantrell had been rejecting the protestant-preferred Classical types of the early 19th Century. In truth, as very well as St Peter, Hook’s key legacy to 19th Century Leeds would be the suburban mission churches in the High Church tradition which he planted in the poorer parts of the city.
Between the congregation for the opening on 2nd September 1841 was Edward Pusey, one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement. Also there that day was a different early adherent to the Motion, the 20 year aged Florence Nightingale.
To see the church that Chantrell crafted you want to stand on the sanctuary methods seeking west, with your back again to the altar, for George Road refashioned the east stop in the 1870s in the thorough Higher Church manner of that time, with marble by Salviati of Venice and his have reredos. The glass previously mentioned is gathered Flemish glass. Your key effect seeking into the nave will be of weighty dark wood, for the 1841 St Peter was basically continue to a products of the Georgian era, and it retains its elaborately carved galleries on 3 sides of the nave, as properly as an huge pulpit which sweeps higher up into room. Of wonderful interest much too is the stained glass in the south aisle and west stop, for like the woodwork it extensively predates the ecclesiological movement that the up coming 10 years or so would bring.
The church is cruciform, but this is not straight away clear since of the way transepts and aisles have been hived off for use as chapels and the like. The wonderful tower sits earlier mentioned the north transept, which forms an entrance space. The chancel aisle to the east of it kinds a war memorial chapel, the outer north nave aisle now includes a cafe. Irrespective of the dimensions 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 vogue. Certainly, if you did not know, you could possibly consider him for a 14th Century prelate. But there are in actuality 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 right after this the Diocese of Ripon was submerged together with the Dioceses of Bradford and Wakefield into the newly shaped Diocese of Leeds in 2014. The new Diocese, the most significant in England, at this time has a few cathedrals of equivalent standing at Ripon, Bradford and Wakefield, but there are very long time period designs for a new cathedral in the wonderful city at the heart of the Diocese, and as part of these it is regarded that Leeds Minster, Leeds Parish Church as was, might acquire on the status of a professional-cathedral.
This, I imagine, would be a pity, for this incredible regenerated town deserves some thing better, some thing significant and wholly new that would be as considerably a beacon for 21st Century Anglicanism as St Peter was for the 19th Century. Leeds is 1 of the largest metropolitan areas in Europe with out a Cathedral for its countrywide church – Dublin and Berlin also spring to brain. No, that new Cathedral wants to be in other places in the city centre. As the position of Anglicanism in English culture shifts and improvements, so St Peter results in being fewer useful as a flagship, and warrants to return to the muscular, sleeves-rolled-up parochial do the job for which Walter Hook supposed it.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2017-11-08 20:20:39
Tagged: , Leeds , Minster , west , yorkshire , nikon , d5300 , yorks
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