Church of All Saints

The Church of All Saints is a Church of England parish church in Clifton, Bristol, standing on Pembroke Road in the Parish of All Saints with St John Clifton, within the Diocese of Bristol. A Grade II listed building, it carries one of the more dramatic architectural histories of any Bristol church: a great Victorian church by G. E. Street, burned out in the Blitz, reborn in the 1960s as a strikingly original modern building, and glazed by John Piper in one of his most experimental commissions.

The story begins in 1862, when a committee was formed to provide a large church for the Clifton area. It would stand in the Anglo-Catholic tradition, and — pointedly, in an age of pew rents — it would be a free church with no rented pews. The original church was built between 1868 and 1872 by George Edmund Street, the architect of the Royal Courts of Justice, with the chancel consecrated on 8 June 1868. A narthex was added in 1909 by George Frederick Bodley, and a sacristy in 1928 by Frederick Charles Eden; the narthex housed the Chapel of Saint Richard of Chichester, built as a memorial to Richard Randall, the first Vicar of All Saints, who went on to become Dean of Chichester.

On the night of 2 December 1940, an incendiary bomb set the building ablaze, destroying the chancel and nave; only the tower, narthex and sacristy were left standing. W. H. Randoll Blacking was chosen to reconstruct the church and produced detailed plans, but after long delays he died in 1958 before work could begin. The shell was listed Grade II on 8 January 1959, and in the 1960s the rebuilding finally went ahead under Robert Potter, Blacking's partner — who took the opportunity to rethink the church entirely. Potter reorientated the building so that the altar faces east, uniting the surviving tower, offices and sacristy with a new church around a cloister entered through the tower. The new lozenge-shaped nave sits to the left of this entrance, incorporating Bodley's former narthex as a side chapel dedicated to St Richard, with a gallery to the other side; the free-standing altar stands beneath a ciborium, a four-columned indoor canopy.

In 1963 Potter recommended John Piper for the commission to glaze the new church. The liturgical theme was agreed in 1964, though Piper executed the work only in 1967, in the closing stages of construction — and the result is one of his most original creations. The windows are made not of conventional stained glass but of fibreglass panels, fabricated to Piper's specification by David and Ann Gillespie of Gillespie Associates in Farnham; once the panels were in place, Piper poured resin onto them to create each coloured section, describing the process as akin to painting on canvas. He used the medium only once more, at St Matthew's, Southcote, in Reading the following year. His principal design fills the floor-to-ceiling west window: on the left, a golden River of Life flows from an urn at the top; on the right rises the Tree of Life, its upward-curving branches finished with red and yellow fruit, the whole bordered with multicoloured stud-like spots. Above the Lady Chapel Piper set a large abstract expanse of variegated blue representing Creation, two full-height columns of red flank the Sanctuary, and a smaller window behind the Shrine of Our Lady completes the scheme.

The new nave and altar were consecrated on 1 July 1967. That same year a stained glass window by Christopher Webb — another former partner of Blacking — was installed in the east window of the narthex; Webb had died the previous year, and it was his last window.

In 1978 the parish was joined with that of St John's Clifton to form the present Parish of All Saints with St John, St John's church itself being declared redundant in 1980. In March 2013 the parochial church council voted to rescind Resolutions A and B and the petition for alternative episcopal oversight, signalling the parish's acceptance of the ordination of women while remaining firmly within the Anglo-Catholic tradition. The church's clergy roll is distinguished: besides Randall, vicars have included Henry Bromby, previously Dean of Hobart, and Fabian Jackson, later Bishop of Trinidad, while the historian Diarmaid MacCulloch — later Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford — served as a non-stipendiary deacon in 1987–88. The organist Cedric Bucknall is among its notable musicians, and the parish records, including the plans of the 1963 remodelling, are held at Bristol Archives.