St Peter, Leeds, West Yorkshire
As with the city in which it sits, Leeds Parish Church is vast, grand, fascinating, and perhaps not straight away likeable. But like the town alone, the church shortly reveals its friendliness and idiosyncrasies to them as are ready to consider it as they uncover it.
St Peter is one particular of the wonderful urban parish churches of England. Building started in 1837, a couple of months after the accession of the youthful Queen. It was the first main creating task in the freshly developed Diocese of Ripon, which experienced been carved out of the Archdiocese of York, and what a task it was. At initially it was planned as a enormous fix job on the 14th Century church which previously stood on this web page. The architect was Robert Chantrell. On the other hand, it grew to become clear to Chantrell that a finish rebuilding was necessary, and so it transpired. The new church was completed in time for opening in 1841. The charge was a very little small of £30,000, about 6 million in present-day revenue, which doesn’t appear to be a ton but of class labour was proportionately so substantially more cost-effective then than currently. And not only was St Peter the initially terrific church of the Victorian era, it was also the most important church created in England for a lot more than a century, considering that 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 adequate 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 Motion, and his church was intended to source a sacramental house as effectively as an evangelising one, which describes its entirely Gothic fashion – Hook and Chantrell were rejecting the protestant-desired Classical types of the early 19th Century. Certainly, as properly as St Peter, Hook’s principal legacy to 19th Century Leeds would be the suburban mission churches in the Substantial Church custom which he planted in the poorer spots of the city.
Among the congregation for the opening on 2nd September 1841 was Edward Pusey, one particular of the leaders of the Oxford Motion. Also there that day was a further early adherent to the Movement, the 20 12 months previous Florence Nightingale.
To see the church that Chantrell crafted you need to have to stand on the sanctuary ways wanting west, with your back to the altar, for George Avenue refashioned the east end in the 1870s in the comprehensive Significant Church style of that time, with marble by Salviati of Venice and his own reredos. The glass over is collected Flemish glass. Your principal impression hunting into the nave will be of large dim wooden, for the 1841 St Peter was fundamentally nonetheless a product or service of the Georgian period, and it retains its elaborately carved galleries on a few sides of the nave, as very well as an massive pulpit which sweeps superior up into area. Of great desire far too is the stained glass in the south aisle and west close, for like the woodwork it completely predates the ecclesiological motion that the next 10 years or so would carry.
The church is cruciform, but this is not promptly apparent simply because of the way transepts and aisles have been hived off for use as chapels and the like. The wonderful tower sits higher than the north transept, which varieties an entrance area. The chancel aisle to the east of it forms a war memorial chapel, the outer north nave aisle now contains a cafe. Inspite of the sizing of the church, the woodwork and divisions can make it seem to be relatively a cluttered put.
Walter Hook lies in effigy atop a tomb in the north chancel chapel in the medieval manner. Indeed, if you failed to know, you could consider him for a 14th Century prelate. But there are in fact a couple 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 after this the Diocese of Ripon was submerged alongside with the Dioceses of Bradford and Wakefield into the recently fashioned Diocese of Leeds in 2014. The new Diocese, the major in England, now has a few cathedrals of equal standing at Ripon, Bradford and Wakefield, but there are long time period options for a new cathedral in the good town at the heart of the Diocese, and as portion of these it is regarded that Leeds Minster, Leeds Parish Church as was, could possibly just take on the position of a professional-cathedral.
This, I feel, would be a pity, for this extraordinary regenerated city warrants one thing greater, some thing major 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 a person of the biggest towns in Europe with no a Cathedral for its national church – Dublin and Berlin also spring to brain. No, that new Cathedral needs to be elsewhere in the city centre. As the part of Anglicanism in English society shifts and alterations, so St Peter will become significantly less beneficial as a flagship, and deserves to return to the muscular, sleeves-rolled-up parochial get the job done for which Walter Hook meant it.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2017-11-08 19:06:45
Tagged: , Leeds , West , Yorkshire , yorks , church , nikon , d5300
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