St Peter, Leeds, West Yorkshire
As with the metropolis in which it sits, Leeds Parish Church is extensive, grand, fascinating, and most likely not quickly likeable. But like the town itself, the church soon reveals its friendliness and idiosyncrasies to them as are prepared to consider it as they find it.
St Peter is a single of the fantastic urban parish churches of England. Design started in 1837, a handful of weeks soon after the accession of the youthful Queen. It was the initial big setting up challenge in the freshly made Diocese of Ripon, which had been carved out of the Archdiocese of York, and what a job it was. At initial it was planned as a large maintenance work on the 14th Century church which beforehand stood on this internet site. The architect was Robert Chantrell. Even so, it became crystal clear to Chantrell that a full rebuilding was vital, and so it transpired. The new church was finished in time for opening in 1841. The price tag was a small brief of £30,000, about six million in present-day funds, which won’t seem to be a whole lot but of course labour was proportionately so much less costly then than nowadays. And not only was St Peter the initial good church of the Victorian era, it was also the biggest church crafted in England for 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 need to be ‘big sufficient to keep as numerous folks 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 offer a sacramental place as perfectly as an evangelising one, which explains its solely Gothic model – Hook and Chantrell were rejecting the protestant-chosen Classical kinds of the early 19th Century. Certainly, as very well as St Peter, Hook’s principal legacy to 19th Century Leeds would be the suburban mission churches in the Significant Church custom which he planted in the poorer locations 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 yet another early adherent to the Movement, the 20 12 months aged Florence Nightingale.
To see the church that Chantrell constructed you want to stand on the sanctuary measures searching west, with your back again to the altar, for George Avenue refashioned the east finish in the 1870s in the complete Higher Church manner of that time, with marble by Salviati of Venice and his own reredos. The glass earlier mentioned is collected Flemish glass. Your key effect on the lookout into the nave will be of heavy dim wooden, for the 1841 St Peter was essentially continue to a solution of the Georgian period, and it retains its elaborately carved galleries on 3 sides of the nave, as effectively as an huge pulpit which sweeps significant up into house. Of terrific desire much too is the stained glass in the south aisle and west close, for like the woodwork it carefully predates the ecclesiological motion that the future 10 years or so would provide.
The church is cruciform, but this is not straight away apparent 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 kinds an entrance place. The chancel aisle to the east of it types a war memorial chapel, the outer north nave aisle now consists of a cafe. Even with the size of the church, the woodwork and divisions can make it appear to be rather a cluttered location.
Walter Hook lies in effigy atop a tomb in the north chancel chapel in the medieval style. Without a doubt, if you failed to know, you may well get him for a 14th Century prelate. But there are in actuality a few 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 soon immediately after this the Diocese of Ripon was submerged along with the Dioceses of Bradford and Wakefield into the newly fashioned Diocese of Leeds in 2014. The new Diocese, the largest in England, currently has a few cathedrals of equal position at Ripon, Bradford and Wakefield, but there are extensive expression plans for a new cathedral in the great metropolis at the heart of the Diocese, and as section of these it is considered that Leeds Minster, Leeds Parish Church as was, might consider on the position of a pro-cathedral.
This, I feel, would be a pity, for this incredible regenerated metropolis warrants some thing better, anything big 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 most important towns in Europe without a Cathedral for its national church – Dublin and Berlin also spring to intellect. No, that new Cathedral needs to be somewhere else in the metropolis centre. As the role of Anglicanism in English tradition shifts and alterations, so St Peter gets less handy as a flagship, and deserves to return to the muscular, sleeves-rolled-up parochial do the job for which Walter Hook meant it.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2017-11-07 18:21:33
Tagged: , Leeds , Minster , West , yorkshire , nikon , d5300 , yorks
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