St Peter, Leeds, West Yorkshire
As with the metropolis in which it sits, Leeds Parish Church is extensive, grand, interesting, and perhaps not promptly likeable. But like the town alone, the church before long reveals its friendliness and idiosyncrasies to them as are well prepared to consider it as they uncover it.
St Peter is just one of the fantastic urban parish churches of England. Building started in 1837, a several months right after the accession of the younger Queen. It was the first key setting up task in the recently developed Diocese of Ripon, which had been carved out of the Archdiocese of York, and what a undertaking it was. At initially it was planned as a large repair position on the 14th Century church which previously stood on this web page. The architect was Robert Chantrell. Nevertheless, it turned crystal clear to Chantrell that a complete rebuilding was vital, and so it transpired. The new church was completed in time for opening in 1841. The price tag was a tiny short of £30,000, about six million in modern revenue, which does not appear a lot but of program labour was proportionately so significantly much less expensive then than these days. And not only was St Peter the to start with great church of the Victorian era, it was also the major church created in England for far more than a century, given that Sir Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral in London.
The constructing 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 enough to keep as lots of people as possible’. But this is no preaching barn, due to the fact Hook was an early follower of the Oxford Motion, and his church was intended to source a sacramental house as properly as an evangelising one, which explains its fully Gothic type – Hook and Chantrell have been rejecting the protestant-most well-liked Classical kinds of the early 19th Century. Without a doubt, as very well as St Peter, Hook’s primary legacy to 19th Century Leeds would be the suburban mission church buildings in the Higher Church tradition which he planted in the poorer places of the metropolis.
Among the congregation for the opening on 2nd September 1841 was Edward Pusey, 1 of the leaders of the Oxford Motion. Also there that working day was an additional early adherent to the Movement, the 20 calendar year old Florence Nightingale.
To see the church that Chantrell crafted you want to stand on the sanctuary methods looking west, with your back again to the altar, for George Avenue refashioned the east stop in the 1870s in the thorough Higher Church manner of that time, with marble by Salviati of Venice and his personal reredos. The glass above is collected Flemish glass. Your most important effect looking into the nave will be of heavy dark wood, for the 1841 St Peter was effectively however a product or service of the Georgian period, and it retains its elaborately carved galleries on three sides of the nave, as perfectly as an huge pulpit which sweeps large up into house. Of terrific fascination also is the stained glass in the south aisle and west end, for like the woodwork it extensively predates the ecclesiological motion that the following 10 years or so would convey.
The church is cruciform, but this is not promptly evident due to the fact of the way transepts and aisles have been hived off for use as chapels and the like. The excellent tower sits earlier mentioned the north transept, which forms an entrance place. The chancel aisle to the east of it varieties a war memorial chapel, the outer north nave aisle now incorporates a cafe. In spite of the dimensions of the church, the woodwork and divisions can make it feel instead a cluttered put.
Walter Hook lies in effigy atop a tomb in the north chancel chapel in the medieval style. Without a doubt, if you did not know, you could choose him for a 14th Century prelate. But there are in truth a pair of survivals which predate the Victorian church, together with the painted Hardwick tomb of the late 17th Century on the south side of the chancel.
In 2011, St Peter was rebadged as Leeds Minster, but soon 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 significant in England, at this time has 3 cathedrals of equivalent standing at Ripon, Bradford and Wakefield, but there are extensive term designs for a new cathedral in the excellent town at the coronary heart of the Diocese, and as component of these it is considered that Leeds Minster, Leeds Parish Church as was, might consider on the status of a professional-cathedral.
This, I assume, would be a pity, for this incredible regenerated metropolis justifies anything far better, a little something massive and wholly new that would be as a great deal a beacon for 21st Century Anglicanism as St Peter was for the 19th Century. Leeds is 1 of the major cities in Europe without the need of a Cathedral for its countrywide church – Dublin and Berlin also spring to intellect. No, that new Cathedral wants to be elsewhere in the town centre. As the part of Anglicanism in English society shifts and changes, so St Peter gets less valuable as a flagship, and justifies to return to the muscular, sleeves-rolled-up parochial operate for which Walter Hook intended it.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2017-11-07 18:21:27
Tagged: , Leeds , Minster , West , yorkshire , nikon , d5300 , yorks
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