All Saints' Church

All Saints' Church was a historic church that once stood in the centre of Southampton, on the corner of the High Street and East Street, a short distance south of the medieval Bargate. Though the building no longer survives — it was heavily damaged in the Southampton Blitz of the Second World War and subsequently demolished — it has a rich and well-documented history, with associations that reach from the medieval monks of St Denys Priory to the novelist Jane Austen and the painter Sir John Everett Millais. Its story is a notable chapter in the religious and cultural history of the city.

The church had medieval origins. The original church on the site was named All Hallows, and was built in medieval times on land granted by King Henry II, who reigned from 1154 to 1189, to the monks of St Denys Priory. This first church had a chancel and a nave with a north aisle, and a tower of three stages. Over the centuries the medieval building fell into disrepair, and in the 1790s it was replaced. The old church of All Hallows was demolished in 1791, and a new building, renamed All Saints, was completed in 1795, following two Acts of Parliament that allowed the trustees of the church to raise the necessary funds from rates on property and rents in the parish. The catacombs of the old All Hallows were incorporated into the new All Saints building, and a separate graveyard was established.

The new church was a fine example of neoclassical design, the work of the architect Willey Reveley. Its most remarkable feature was an arched ceiling that spanned the whole of the sanctuary — some 90 feet long and 60 feet wide — without the use of any supporting pillars, a considerable architectural achievement. The frontage was dominated by four columns supporting Grecian pilasters and a triangular pediment, in the elegant classical taste of the late Georgian age.

All Saints' became a fashionable and well-attended church, and counted some celebrated figures among its congregation. The novelist Jane Austen, who lived in Southampton between 1806 and 1809, regularly attended services here, and the great Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir John Everett Millais was baptised in the church. A new organ was installed in 1861, and a substantial refurbishment was carried out in 1872. The catacombs beneath the church became the resting place of many notable people, among them a Chancellor of the Exchequer and two distinguished Royal Navy officers; in August 1944 the remains of all 403 people buried in the catacombs were reverently transferred to a communal grave elsewhere in Southampton.

The end came in the Second World War. During the Southampton Blitz, when the great port city was a major target for enemy bombing, All Saints' Church was heavily damaged, and the ruined building was afterwards demolished. Today nothing of the church remains on its site in the busy city centre, but its memory endures in the records of the city and in its associations with some of the most famous figures of English literature and art.

The site of the church lies in the centre of Southampton, on the High Street near the Bargate, the great medieval gateway that is the city's most famous landmark. Nearby are the surviving medieval town walls and vaults of Southampton, the Tudor House Museum, the SeaCity Museum telling the story of the Titanic, which sailed from the port in 1912, the modern shopping centres of the city, and the waterfront of one of England's great ports, with the New Forest and the Hampshire coast within easy reach.

From the medieval church of All Hallows, built on land granted by Henry II to the monks of St Denys Priory, through its rebuilding as the neoclassical All Saints by Willey Reveley in 1795, its congregation that included Jane Austen and the young Millais, to its destruction in the Southampton Blitz, All Saints' Church gathers many centuries of the history of Southampton into its story. Though the building itself is gone, it remains a memorable part of the religious and cultural heritage of the city — a lost church whose history still speaks of the long Christian past of Southampton.