St Peter, Leeds, West Yorkshire
As with the town in which it sits, Leeds Parish Church is wide, grand, intriguing, and possibly not immediately likeable. But like the town by itself, the church shortly reveals its friendliness and idiosyncrasies to them as are geared up to take it as they locate it.
St Peter is a single of the excellent city parish churches of England. Construction began in 1837, a few months soon after the accession of the young Queen. It was the very first main building challenge in the newly created Diocese of Ripon, which had been carved out of the Archdiocese of York, and what a undertaking it was. At very first it was prepared as a huge mend task on the 14th Century church which earlier stood on this website. The architect was Robert Chantrell. On the other hand, it turned apparent to Chantrell that a comprehensive rebuilding was necessary, and so it happened. The new church was completed in time for opening in 1841. The charge was a minor shorter of £30,000, about 6 million in present-day income, which doesn’t seem a great deal but of training course labour was proportionately so a great deal less costly then than now. And not only was St Peter the initially excellent church of the Victorian period, it was also the biggest church built in England for a lot more than a century, because 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 really should be ‘big sufficient to keep as quite a few men and women 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 place as perfectly as an evangelising one particular, which describes its entirely Gothic design – Hook and Chantrell were being rejecting the protestant-most well-liked Classical types of the early 19th Century. Indeed, as well as St Peter, Hook’s major legacy to 19th Century Leeds would be the suburban mission churches in the Significant Church tradition which he planted in the poorer places of the town.
Among the congregation for the opening on 2nd September 1841 was Edward Pusey, a single of the leaders of the Oxford Movement. Also there that day was a further early adherent to the Movement, the 20 yr old Florence Nightingale.
To see the church that Chantrell constructed you will need to stand on the sanctuary ways hunting west, with your back to the altar, for George Road refashioned the east end in the 1870s in the comprehensive Superior Church manner of that time, with marble by Salviati of Venice and his individual reredos. The glass earlier mentioned is collected Flemish glass. Your principal impression on the lookout into the nave will be of heavy darkish wooden, for the 1841 St Peter was fundamentally nonetheless a item of the Georgian era, and it retains its elaborately carved galleries on a few sides of the nave, as effectively as an great pulpit which sweeps large up into house. Of great desire far too is the stained glass in the south aisle and west close, for like the woodwork it thoroughly predates the ecclesiological motion that the up coming decade or so would deliver.
The church is cruciform, but this is not instantly noticeable because of the way transepts and aisles have been hived off for use as chapels and the like. The excellent tower sits higher than the north transept, which kinds an entrance place. The chancel aisle to the east of it kinds a war memorial chapel, the outer north nave aisle now is made up of a cafe. Even with the measurement of the church, the woodwork and divisions can make it appear to be fairly a cluttered area.
Walter Hook lies in effigy atop a tomb in the north chancel chapel in the medieval trend. Indeed, if you did not know, you could possibly take him for a 14th Century prelate. But there are in simple fact a couple of survivals which predate the Victorian church, including 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 after this the Diocese of Ripon was submerged together with the Dioceses of Bradford and Wakefield into the recently formed Diocese of Leeds in 2014. The new Diocese, the largest in England, at this time has a few cathedrals of equivalent standing at Ripon, Bradford and Wakefield, but there are extended expression options for a new cathedral in the excellent metropolis at the heart of the Diocese, and as section of these it is regarded as that Leeds Minster, Leeds Parish Church as was, may possibly acquire on the position of a professional-cathedral.
This, I believe, would be a pity, for this amazing regenerated town warrants a little something better, one thing huge and wholly new that would be as considerably a beacon for 21st Century Anglicanism as St Peter was for the 19th Century. Leeds is a single of the major cities in Europe devoid of a Cathedral for its countrywide church – Dublin and Berlin also spring to thoughts. No, that new Cathedral requires to be in other places in the town centre. As the part of Anglicanism in English culture shifts and adjustments, so St Peter gets to be much less helpful 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 06:44:36
Tagged: , Leeds , Minster , west , yorkshire , nikon , d5300 , yorks
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