St Peter, Leeds, West Yorkshire
As with the city in which it sits, Leeds Parish Church is vast, grand, fascinating, and perhaps not immediately likeable. But like the city itself, the church soon reveals its friendliness and idiosyncrasies to them as are prepared to take it as they find it.
St Peter is one of the great urban parish churches of England. Construction began in 1837, a few weeks after the accession of the young Queen. It was the first major building project in the newly created Diocese of Ripon, which had been carved out of the Archdiocese of York, and what a project it was. At first it was planned as a massive repair job on the 14th Century church which previously stood on this site. The architect was Robert Chantrell. However, it became clear to Chantrell that a complete rebuilding was necessary, and so it happened. The new church was finished in time for opening in 1841. The cost was a little short of £30,000, about six million in today's money, which doesn't seem a lot but of course labour was proportionately so much cheaper then than today. And not only was St Peter the first great church of the Victorian era, it was also the biggest church built in England for more than a century, since Sir Christopher Wren's St Paul's Cathedral in London.
The building went up at the behest of the Vicar of Leeds, Walter Hook. Famously, his sole instruction to Chantrell was that the church should be 'big enough to hold as many people as possible'. But this is no preaching barn, because Hook was an early follower of the Oxford Movement, and his church was intended to supply a sacramental space as well as an evangelising one, which explains its entirely Gothic style - Hook and Chantrell were rejecting the protestant-preferred Classical forms of the early 19th Century. Indeed, as well as St Peter, Hook's main legacy to 19th Century Leeds would be the suburban mission churches in the High Church tradition which he planted in the poorer areas of the city.
Among the congregation for the opening on 2nd September 1841 was Edward Pusey, one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement. Also there that day was another early adherent to the Movement, the 20 year old Florence Nightingale.
To see the church that Chantrell built you need to stand on the sanctuary steps looking west, with your back to the altar, for George Street refashioned the east end in the 1870s in the thorough High Church fashion of that time, with marble by Salviati of Venice and his own reredos. The glass above is collected Flemish glass. Your main impression looking into the nave will be of heavy dark wood, for the 1841 St Peter was essentially still a product of the Georgian era, and it retains its elaborately carved galleries on three sides of the nave, as well as an enormous pulpit which sweeps high up into space. Of great interest too is the stained glass in the south aisle and west end, for like the woodwork it thoroughly predates the ecclesiological movement that the next decade or so would bring.
The church is cruciform, but this is not immediately obvious because of the way transepts and aisles have been hived off for use as chapels and the like. The great tower sits above the north transept, which forms 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. Despite the size of the church, the woodwork and divisions can make it seem rather a cluttered place.
Walter Hook lies in effigy atop a tomb in the north chancel chapel in the medieval fashion. Indeed, if you didn't know, you might take him for a 14th Century prelate. But there are in fact a couple of survivals which predate the Victorian church, including 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 soon after this the Diocese of Ripon was submerged along with the Dioceses of Bradford and Wakefield into the newly formed Diocese of Leeds in 2014. The new Diocese, the biggest in England, currently has three cathedrals of equal status at Ripon, Bradford and Wakefield, but there are long term plans for a new cathedral in the great city at the heart of the Diocese, and as part of these it is considered that Leeds Minster, Leeds Parish Church as was, might take on the status of a pro-cathedral.
This, I think, would be a pity, for this extraordinary regenerated city deserves something better, something big and wholly new that would be as much a beacon for 21st Century Anglicanism as St Peter was for the 19th Century. Leeds is one of the biggest cities in Europe without a Cathedral for its national church - Dublin and Berlin also spring to mind. No, that new Cathedral needs to be elsewhere in the city centre. As the role of Anglicanism in English culture shifts and changes, so St Peter becomes less useful as a flagship, and deserves to return to the muscular, sleeves-rolled-up parochial work for which Walter Hook intended it.