All Saints Church, Hove

All Saints Hove stands at a major crossroads in the heart of Hove, at the corner of Eaton Road and The Drive — an imposing Grade I listed church that has served as the parish church of the whole of Hove since 1892, and one of the largest churches of the entire nineteenth-century Gothic Revival. Pevsner called it "superb and cathedral-like", and the comparison is apt: its architect, John Loughborough Pearson, was simultaneously at work on Truro Cathedral, and All Saints bears a family resemblance to it.

The parishes of Hove and Preston had been united as the single benefice of Hove-cum-Preston since 1531, served by St Andrew's Church — Saxon in origin, rebuilt from near-dereliction in 1836 as the area's population grew. When the parish was divided in 1879 into separate parishes for Hove and Preston, St Andrew's became Hove's parish church, but the first vicar of Hove, the Revd Thomas Peacey, appointed that same year, immediately set his sights higher, selecting Pearson — the most distinguished church architect of the day — to design a replacement. Peacey moved fast on practicalities too: the old vicarage had ended up inside Preston parish, so he secured land from the Stanford family estate at the corner of what became Eaton Road and The Drive, big enough for both vicarage and church. Pearson's red-brick vicarage, built in 1883 with elements of Renaissance style, is itself listed at Grade II.

The church followed. The first stone was laid on 25 April 1889, and the building rose in stages: the nave and aisles, the core of the present church, cost £14,000 and were consecrated on 1 May 1891 by Richard Durnford, Bishop of Chichester, who personally gave £1,000 toward the cost. The eastern end was not finished until 1901, four years after Pearson's death, its completion overseen by his son Frank Loughborough Pearson and consecrated by Bishop Ernest Roland Wilberforce on 1 November 1901. The south-western tower and adjacent narthex came in 1924 — the tower never finished, though inside it stands a statue of Revd Peacey holding a model of his church. By then some £40,000 had been spent. All Saints became the parish church of Hove in 1892, and its parish — covering most of eastern Hove from the seafront to the Old Shoreham Road — is one of the most populous in the Diocese of Chichester. (The parish's former church of St Thomas the Apostle, declared redundant in 1993, is now the Coptic Orthodox church of St Mary and St Abraam.)

Pearson built in local sandstone, in marked contrast to the knapped flint and red brick of his other Hove church, St Barnabas, and chose an Early English Decorated style unlike his major London churches. The interior is of stone throughout — a treatment normally reserved for the grandest medieval buildings — under a great roof of Sussex oak. The narthex opens into a very wide nave with tall arcades that Pevsner likened to those of Exeter Cathedral, leading to a chancel with side chapels, one of them enclosed by a richly carved wooden canopied screen dedicated to the parishioners killed in the First World War. The whole composition drives the eye toward the great stone reredos carved by Nathaniel Hitch and installed in 1908 — Pearson contrived the design to concentrate attention upon it, and the architect Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel judged the east end "as nearly perfect as can be". The oak choir stalls and canopies, designed by Frank Loughborough Pearson in memory of Thomas Peacey, the stone pulpit and the seven-sided red marble font complete the furnishings, and the church has a complete scheme of stained glass by Clayton & Bell — the great west window commemorating Edward VII, who attended a service here in 1896 as Prince of Wales.

The organ is among the most important in the south of England. Built by William Hill & Son of London with fourteen stops in 1894, it was enlarged in 1905 to forty-eight speaking stops — including the only full-length 32-foot Open Wood stop between London and Winchester — and encased in 1915 in a magnificent double-fronted case by Frank Loughborough Pearson. Restored in 1987, it was among the first organs awarded a historic organ certificate of international importance by the British Institute of Organ Studies, and its restoration has informed work on other great Hill organs at Peterborough and Lichfield cathedrals and Eton College.

All Saints today is regularly open to visitors and much used for live music alongside its services several days a week, with Sunday school and crèche provision — a working parish church on a cathedral scale, presiding over the crossroads of Hove as Thomas Peacey intended.