Church Heritage Record 610044

7-bay aisled nave, 2-bay chancel flanked by side chapel and vestry/organ chamber, west tower. Hall to north, big enough to be a separate church.

Nave estimated to be c 30m (110ft) x 11m (40ft).

Brighton has older churches, but this building was built to be its Anglican showpiece at the height of the town’s expansion, despite its original status as a Chapel-of-ease to St Nicholas, the ancient parish church.  A competition to design the church was held, won to general surprise by the relatively unknown Charles Barry, who was only 28 at the time, and built with money from the Commissioners between 1824 and 1828. Barry was to become a very a busy man; in the same year he had won his first major civic commission, the Royal Institution in Manchester (later to become the City Art Gallery), by contrast in his preferred neo-Classical style.  In Brighton he went on to design the Royal Sussex County Hospital in 1828. 

The original church building consisted of the existing tower and aisled nave and a small apsidal chancel, making it internally symmetrical.  Inside, the nave had galleries to the north, south and west.  Some drawings are preserved within the church showing that a spire was intended which would have emphasised still further the verticality of this most physically isolated of town centre churches, but this was never built.

By 1872 the church was in need of repair and liturgical reordering.  It was decided to extend the nave by one bay, remove part of the west gallery to accommodate the organ and replace the box pews in the nave with new seating.  This was done by J T Micklethwaite and George Somers Clarke Junior, the son of the vestry clerk.  St Peter’s was raised to parish church status at this time. The replacement of the polygonal chancel was also proposed at this time but was only begun in 1889.  The chapel was finished in 1898, and the chancel in 1906.  The nave galleries were removed during the earlier phase of the work. The memorial hall to the north was added in 1927.

The church was thoroughly restored by J L Denman in 1966 (who also worked at St Paul’s West Street and elsewhere), whose work included the painting of the decorated chancel ceiling. There is now a nave altar, standing on roughly the same spot as Barry’s original, added in 1987 at which point the foremost four rows of nave benches were removed and the choir stalls moved forward. The history of the church is therefore characterised by constant evolution, rather than representing a fixed point in time or being the product of a single vision, though Barry’s was certainly the most important contribution.

The church was designed in the Perpendicular style, but all treated quite loosely with great flair and imagination. Although a “Commissioner’s church”, it is by no means a standard or weak design, but a tour de force.  Goodhart-Rendel says of it, “No better Gothic church than this was designed during the first quarter of the nineteenth century”, with which it would be hard to argue.  Verticality is the dominant theme, both inside and out; the later additions have tended to “spread out” the church by lengthening and broadening its footprint.

The additions are also of good quality, the chancel by Micklethwaite & Somers Clarke in a later Perpendicular style and a little incongruous, possibly an attempt to indicate an archaeological development.  The difference in colour and texture of the Portland and Weald stone emphasise these disparate parts. The north hall is a considerable feature in its own right, rather unbalancing the composition.

The church is said to have been inspired by the Lady chapel at York Minster. The tower is the feature with most impact, although it is not particularly big, rather in the tradition of “weak” Commissioner’s church towers. The composition is anything but weak, however, being slender and graceful, with tall corner pinnacles making up somewhat for the lack of height and footprint.

Indeed, the whole building is embellished with pinnacles to each bay, the largest rising from the western corners of the nave and framing the tower itself.  This framing motif is picked up again by flying buttresses springing to the central stage of the tower, surely an architectural conceit considering the support given by the broad lower stage with its quadripartite base. Barry was seemingly intent on being as flamboyant with the vocabulary of Gothic as Nash had just been with the “Eastern” architecture of the Royal Pavilion.

The upper stage of the tower framed by the pinnacles is crowned by a quatrefoiled parapet, underneath which is the belfry stage, with extremely tall 2-light openings with moulded and crocketed ogee heads; there is blind panel tracery in the spandrels, three bays each side. 

The middle stage has a clock face within a squared frame, the buttresses now plain under the pinnacles.  This is recessed behind a gabletted parapet with quatrefoils in the gablets (a motif repeated elsewhere), in the middle of which rises the finial of a huge ogee arch with moulded frames containing a 3-light Decorated window over the west door, the latter within its own squared frame, a most original composition.  Again, just to top it off, slender pinnacles rise from the moulded capitals of the hoodmould. Similar doorways to the south and north sides of the tower base.  There are 3-light windows in the west ends of the aisles over slender pointed doorways with ogee finials (these invisible on the inside as they lead to small rooms and the stairs flanking the tower).

The nave has huge pointed 3-light windows with Perpendicular tracery under hoodmoulds with head stops between pinnacled and crocketed buttresses, including thick panelled transoms in the aisle windows across the middle which were related to the internal galleries to the aisles. The quite narrow clearstorey has 2-light flat-arched windows with trefoiled and intersecting tracery.

The south-east chapel is of 4 bays, its east window of five lights under a depressed arch, the south side having a 4-centred-arched entrance under a lean-to roof with ogee hoodmould, flanking lesenes, a band of dogtooth ornament and cornice, and four 4-centred, 4-light windows between pinnacled and crocketed buttresses. The chancel clearstorey has six 3-light windows, the east window is an enormous 11-light with Perpendicular tracery, broad and just pointed, with a stepped parapet above. Small windows in the protruding plinth betray the existence of the undercroft.  The gabled and rendered memorial hall has a shallow porch with pointed doorway and five 3-light Tudor-arched windows on the south side between shallow buttresses and a 5-light east and west window.

Entering through the internal porches and the tower space with its attractively painted vaulted roof with the Agnus dei into the nave, the interior appears rather disjointed and it is easy to feel rather lost in the vast spaces of the nave and chancel, with no break between in the absence of a chancel arch or screen.  The arcades are carried through unbroken into the chancel with huge square responds the only demarcation.  The nave altar focuses one’s eyes well short of the chancel, which recedes into gloominess behind.

Adding to this first impression is the contrast between the rendered and whitewashed nave and the bare stone of the east wall of the chancel, quite different in feel and again crying out for demarcation. The huge east window under its broad arch is again somewhat at odds with the verticality of Barry’s composition.  The interior would have looked very different when the nave had galleries on three sides and the space was closed to the east by Barry’s apse.  As it is the nave seems a little empty and bleak.

To give a little more detail, the nave is fully pewed with 1870s benches (some have been removed to make way for the nave altar) which have attractive carving on the bench ends, but are not exceptional.  The view west is of blank white walls, with panelled pointed doors in the canted side walls of the west end giving access to the stairs and rooms already mentioned.  Dado panelling to aisles and base of nave arcade. Stone floors throughout with lozenge patterning in the chancel, some with inscribed dates.  The nave arcades are carried on clustered columns with hollow mouldings acting as vault-shafts carrying the sexpartite rib-vaulted plaster roof of the nave, with foliate bosses, and quadripartite vaulting to the aisles. The south-east chapel (dedicated to St George) has a flat panelled ceiling as has the first bay of both aisles, arched entrances with an ornate crocketed archivolt of ogee profile.  Within the chapel are an ornate reredos and a marble piscina and aumbry, modern chairs, chequerboard floor.

The chancel, though a fine design in its own right, forms a second lofty and rather disparate space, despite the rhythm of the tall slender pointed and moulded arcades continuing unbroken in an effort to mitigate this. The arcades are slightly different in their detailing, clustered columns with wave moulding and vault-shafts supporting wooden brackets break through the coved frieze of scrolling foliage at wall-plate level.  Above is a low-pitched, panelled roof with bosses and painted emblems.  There are corbelled out rood openings in the chancel responds (no arch), which are also carved with the keys of St Peter and the names of benefactors including two Mayors of Brighton.  The enormous organ case and pipes dominate the north side of the chancel, behind this a doorway leads off to vestries and the undercroft, a mostly unused space of brick rooms and corridors.  It is presumed that the handsome set of choir stalls with poppyheads was introduced when the chancel was completed in 1906; they have been moved west to flank the nave altar. There is a sedilia of six bays with ornate carving and cornice.  Flanking the altar, which is raised several steps, are crocketed niches with statues of the Virgin Mary and St Peter.