St Peter, Leeds, West Yorkshire
As with the city in which it sits, Leeds Parish Church is huge, grand, intriguing, and potentially not straight away likeable. But like the town itself, the church before long reveals its friendliness and idiosyncrasies to them as are prepared to consider it as they locate it.
St Peter is a person of the fantastic urban parish church buildings of England. Design commenced in 1837, a couple months right after the accession of the youthful Queen. It was the to start with major building challenge in the newly produced Diocese of Ripon, which had been carved out of the Archdiocese of York, and what a job it was. At initial it was prepared as a significant repair service work on the 14th Century church which previously stood on this web site. The architect was Robert Chantrell. Having said that, it became crystal clear to Chantrell that a full rebuilding was important, and so it happened. The new church was finished in time for opening in 1841. The value was a minor quick of £30,000, about 6 million in modern dollars, which will not look a large amount but of course labour was proportionately so significantly much less expensive then than currently. And not only was St Peter the initial great church of the Victorian period, it was also the greatest church designed in England for a lot more than a century, due to the fact Sir Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral in London.
The developing went up at the behest of the Vicar of Leeds, Walter Hook. Famously, his sole instruction to Chantrell was that the church should really be ‘big enough to maintain as numerous people today as possible’. But this is no preaching barn, for the reason that Hook was an early follower of the Oxford Motion, and his church was intended to source a sacramental house as effectively as an evangelising one particular, which points out its fully Gothic design and style – Hook and Chantrell have been rejecting the protestant-preferred Classical varieties of the early 19th Century. Indeed, as nicely as St Peter, Hook’s most important legacy to 19th Century Leeds would be the suburban mission churches in the Significant Church tradition which he planted in the poorer spots of the metropolis.
Among the the congregation for the opening on 2nd September 1841 was Edward Pusey, a single of the leaders of the Oxford Motion. Also there that working day was a different early adherent to the Motion, the 20 yr aged Florence Nightingale.
To see the church that Chantrell created you will need to stand on the sanctuary ways looking west, with your back again to the altar, for George Street refashioned the east close in the 1870s in the thorough High Church manner of that time, with marble by Salviati of Venice and his individual reredos. The glass over is collected Flemish glass. Your primary effect searching into the nave will be of major dark wood, for the 1841 St Peter was effectively nevertheless a item of the Georgian period, and it retains its elaborately carved galleries on three sides of the nave, as properly as an tremendous pulpit which sweeps substantial up into room. Of wonderful fascination far too is the stained glass in the south aisle and west stop, for like the woodwork it carefully predates the ecclesiological motion that the next ten years or so would deliver.
The church is cruciform, but this is not instantly clear due to the fact of the way transepts and aisles have been hived off for use as chapels and the like. The fantastic tower sits earlier mentioned the north transept, which types an entrance space. The chancel aisle to the east of it sorts a war memorial chapel, the outer north nave aisle now incorporates a cafe. Even with the dimensions of the church, the woodwork and divisions can make it seem rather a cluttered put.
Walter Hook lies in effigy atop a tomb in the north chancel chapel in the medieval vogue. Indeed, if you didn’t know, you may well take him for a 14th Century prelate. But there are in reality a pair of survivals which predate the Victorian church, which include the painted Hardwick tomb of the late 17th Century on the south facet of the chancel.
In 2011, St Peter was rebadged as Leeds Minster, but shortly just after this the Diocese of Ripon was submerged alongside with the Dioceses of Bradford and Wakefield into the newly fashioned Diocese of Leeds in 2014. The new Diocese, the biggest in England, presently has a few cathedrals of equal standing at Ripon, Bradford and Wakefield, but there are extended time period strategies for a new cathedral in the wonderful town at the coronary heart of the Diocese, and as portion of these it is regarded that Leeds Minster, Leeds Parish Church as was, may choose on the status of a professional-cathedral.
This, I feel, would be a pity, for this remarkable regenerated metropolis justifies a little something much better, some thing big and wholly new that would be as significantly 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 nationwide church – Dublin and Berlin also spring to thoughts. No, that new Cathedral wants to be in other places in the city centre. As the purpose of Anglicanism in English society shifts and variations, so St Peter gets to be much less useful as a flagship, and deserves to return to the muscular, sleeves-rolled-up parochial perform for which Walter Hook intended it.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2017-11-08 06:44:30
Tagged: , Leeds , Minster , west , yorkshire , nikon , d5300 , yorks
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