Church Heritage Record 610091

Cruciform in plan: apsidal chancel facing on to Sackville Road, north and south transepts, north-east organ bay and vestry, south-east Lady Chapel, 4-bay aisled nave, gabled porch in north-east corner onto Coleridge Street, entrance now in the south-west corner from Byron Street on the site of the tower which was never built.

Nave estimated to be c 26m (85ft) x 7m (22ft).

Built 1882–1883 for Rev’d Canon Thomas Peacey, the first Vicar of Hove, the architect was John Loughborough Pearson, who was of course responsible for the majestic All Saints in which parish this church is. The carving of the capitals was only completed 1923.  A similar if not identical church design was offered by Pearson for St Matthews, Silverhill, St Leonards in 1884. This was completed more or less according to his plans, including the tower which was not built at St Barnabas, as indeed it was not at All Saints.  The vicarage and linked parish room which stand to the south of the church were built in 1893 by the architects Clayton and Black.

The church is designed in the Early English style, or perhaps better Transitional, but with geometrical tracery in the transept windows.  The roof runs in a straight line from one end of the building to the other and is only interrupted by a small lead-clad fleche at the point where the nave and chancel meet.  The tall apsidal chancel facing Sackville Road is the most prominent feature of the church.  It is pierced by a row of lancet windows framed by a blind arcade.  The aisles have 2-light Y-tracery windows to each bay, a 3-light plate tracery window in the west wall but the transepts have four-lights with Decorated tracery as noted above. Two paired lancets in the east wall of the vestry, which has a steep roof sloping east, behind which is the higher organ chamber with roof of a similar pitch. Lady chapel has a two-light in each wall. The north-west porch is very small and shallow, with a chamfered brick doorway of several orders with hood-moulds carried round as a string-course.

The originally exposed red brick in the nave has been painted over. The nave is full of ranks of chairs, as it always has been. Across the west wall under the window is a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper.  Looking east, the pointed plain arches of the arcades are carried on compound piers with Romanesque foliate capitals.  Semi-circular pilasters rise from the piers to the foliate corbels for the roof at wall-plate height.  There is a blind clearstorey, or better expressed a kind of false triforium, an intermittent blind arcade of miniature columns with cushion capitals in pairs. The aisles are rendered and cross vaulted. Plain wooden panelling around the walls.

There is no chancel arch and the open crown-post rafter roof continues unbroken through, but the division is marked by a splendid gilded and painted wrought iron rood screen erected in 1913 by Bainbridge Reynolds.  There are two steps up to the chancel and a further to the sanctuary, then two more to the altar with a marble tessera pavement. The east end beyond is dominated by a huge reredos by Bodley in the apse hiding all but the tops of the three central windows with their fine stained glass and rere-arches.  There is also oak panelling and statues of saints and altar front in the sanctuary carved between 1902 and 1923 by Captain Louis Wyatt and gilded by Father Smythe.  The excellent choir stalls with poppy heads and carved side panels were designed by Pearson. Oak screens on the east side of the north transept and behind the north choir stalls were added in the early 1930s.

Double arches from the chancel and south aisle lead into the Lady Chapel, the highlight of which is its fine altar and patterned marble floor. There is the remnant of what seems to have once been a scheme of Victorian decoration on the walls behind this, tiles with texts, covered at the time with curtains. The rest of this may be behind the emulsion paint applied in the recent past. There is also an altar at the east end of the north aisle, behind which is the organ console.