St Peter, Leeds, West Yorkshire
As with the town in which it sits, Leeds Parish Church is wide, grand, fascinating, and potentially not quickly likeable. But like the city by itself, the church before long reveals its friendliness and idiosyncrasies to them as are geared up to choose it as they obtain it.
St Peter is one particular of the terrific city parish churches of England. Building began in 1837, a number of weeks just after the accession of the younger Queen. It was the initial key developing task in the newly developed Diocese of Ripon, which had been carved out of the Archdiocese of York, and what a project it was. At initially it was prepared as a significant repair task on the 14th Century church which previously stood on this web page. The architect was Robert Chantrell. Even so, it became distinct to Chantrell that a entire rebuilding was vital, and so it happened. The new church was finished in time for opening in 1841. The value was a small shorter of £30,000, about 6 million in present-day cash, which would not seem to be a good deal but of training course labour was proportionately so considerably less costly then than these days. And not only was St Peter the to start with great church of the Victorian era, it was also the greatest church created in England for additional than a century, because Sir Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral in London.
The making 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 enough to hold as many individuals as possible’. But this is no preaching barn, for the reason that Hook was an early follower of the Oxford Movement, and his church was supposed to supply a sacramental area as well as an evangelising a single, which points out its completely Gothic design and style – Hook and Chantrell were being rejecting the protestant-desired Classical kinds of the early 19th Century. Certainly, as very well as St Peter, Hook’s main legacy to 19th Century Leeds would be the suburban mission church buildings in the Substantial Church tradition 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 another early adherent to the Motion, the 20 year old Florence Nightingale.
To see the church that Chantrell designed you require to stand on the sanctuary steps wanting west, with your back again to the altar, for George Road refashioned the east close in the 1870s in the extensive Higher Church fashion of that time, with marble by Salviati of Venice and his very own reredos. The glass earlier mentioned is collected Flemish glass. Your main impact wanting into the nave will be of large darkish wooden, for the 1841 St Peter was primarily continue to a products of the Georgian era, and it retains its elaborately carved galleries on a few sides of the nave, as properly as an massive pulpit which sweeps substantial up into space. Of fantastic interest much too is the stained glass in the south aisle and west end, for like the woodwork it extensively predates the ecclesiological movement that the subsequent 10 years or so would deliver.
The church is cruciform, but this is not instantly 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 place. The chancel aisle to the east of it varieties a war memorial chapel, the outer north nave aisle now consists of a cafe. Even with the sizing of the church, the woodwork and divisions can make it look somewhat a cluttered area.
Walter Hook lies in effigy atop a tomb in the north chancel chapel in the medieval manner. In truth, if you didn’t know, you might just take him for a 14th Century prelate. But there are in simple fact a few 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 shortly immediately after this the Diocese of Ripon was submerged together with the Dioceses of Bradford and Wakefield into the newly fashioned Diocese of Leeds in 2014. The new Diocese, the greatest in England, at present has a few cathedrals of equal standing at Ripon, Bradford and Wakefield, but there are prolonged phrase ideas for a new cathedral in the wonderful metropolis at the coronary heart of the Diocese, and as part of these it is considered that Leeds Minster, Leeds Parish Church as was, may well choose on the position of a pro-cathedral.
This, I believe, would be a pity, for this remarkable regenerated city deserves something far better, a thing significant and wholly new that would be as substantially a beacon for 21st Century Anglicanism as St Peter was for the 19th Century. Leeds is one of the biggest metropolitan areas in Europe with out a Cathedral for its national church – Dublin and Berlin also spring to thoughts. No, that new Cathedral demands to be elsewhere in the city centre. As the role of Anglicanism in English society shifts and adjustments, so St Peter will become much less useful as a flagship, and deserves to return to the muscular, sleeves-rolled-up parochial operate for which Walter Hook meant it.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2017-11-08 06:44:33
Tagged: , Leeds , Minster , west , yorkshire , nikon , d5300 , yorks
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