St Peter, Leeds, West Yorkshire
As with the metropolis in which it sits, Leeds Parish Church is wide, grand, interesting, and maybe not promptly likeable. But like the city alone, the church shortly reveals its friendliness and idiosyncrasies to them as are well prepared to acquire it as they come across it.
St Peter is one particular of the great urban parish church buildings of England. Design commenced in 1837, a number of weeks immediately after the accession of the young Queen. It was the initial significant building task in the newly made Diocese of Ripon, which experienced been carved out of the Archdiocese of York, and what a challenge it was. At first it was prepared as a substantial mend occupation on the 14th Century church which beforehand stood on this site. The architect was Robert Chantrell. Nevertheless, it became crystal clear to Chantrell that a entire rebuilding was essential, and so it took place. The new church was concluded in time for opening in 1841. The cost was a very little brief of £30,000, about 6 million in present day funds, which doesn’t appear a good deal but of training course labour was proportionately so substantially less expensive then than these days. And not only was St Peter the very first wonderful church of the Victorian period, it was also the major church built in England for additional than a century, given that Sir Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral in London.
The creating 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 several persons 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 meant to provide a sacramental room as effectively as an evangelising one, which describes its solely Gothic model – Hook and Chantrell had been rejecting the protestant-chosen Classical forms of the early 19th Century. Certainly, as well as St Peter, Hook’s principal legacy to 19th Century Leeds would be the suburban mission church buildings in the Superior Church custom which he planted in the poorer parts of the town.
Amid 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 Motion, the 20 year previous Florence Nightingale.
To see the church that Chantrell developed you want to stand on the sanctuary steps seeking west, with your back again to the altar, for George Avenue refashioned the east stop in the 1870s in the complete Significant Church manner of that time, with marble by Salviati of Venice and his individual reredos. The glass earlier mentioned is gathered Flemish glass. Your principal perception seeking into the nave will be of weighty dim wood, for the 1841 St Peter was primarily still a product of the Georgian era, and it retains its elaborately carved galleries on 3 sides of the nave, as properly as an enormous pulpit which sweeps high up into space. Of excellent fascination much too is the stained glass in the south aisle and west end, for like the woodwork it comprehensively predates the ecclesiological movement that the upcoming 10 years or so would convey.
The church is cruciform, but this is not straight away evident since of the way transepts and aisles have been hived off for use as chapels and the like. The terrific tower sits above the north transept, which varieties an entrance area. The chancel aisle to the east of it sorts a war memorial chapel, the outer north nave aisle now contains a cafe. Despite the sizing of the church, the woodwork and divisions can make it seem to be alternatively a cluttered area.
Walter Hook lies in effigy atop a tomb in the north chancel chapel in the medieval style. In truth, if you failed to know, you may well choose him for a 14th Century prelate. But there are in actuality 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 quickly soon after this the Diocese of Ripon was submerged together with the Dioceses of Bradford and Wakefield into the recently shaped Diocese of Leeds in 2014. The new Diocese, the most important in England, now has a few cathedrals of equivalent status at Ripon, Bradford and Wakefield, but there are extended expression strategies for a new cathedral in the terrific metropolis at the heart of the Diocese, and as portion of these it is regarded that Leeds Minster, Leeds Parish Church as was, might acquire on the standing of a pro-cathedral.
This, I believe, would be a pity, for this incredible regenerated city deserves a thing much better, anything 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 just one of the most significant metropolitan areas in Europe without a Cathedral for its national church – Dublin and Berlin also spring to thoughts. No, that new Cathedral needs to be elsewhere in the metropolis centre. As the part of Anglicanism in English lifestyle shifts and improvements, so St Peter turns into significantly less practical as a flagship, and justifies to return to the muscular, sleeves-rolled-up parochial operate for which Walter Hook intended it.
Posted by Simon Knott on 2017-11-07 18:21:36
Tagged: , Leeds , Minster , West , yorkshire , nikon , d5300 , yorks
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