Church of St Jude the Apostle with St Matthias on the Weir

St Jude's Church — formally the Church of St Jude the Apostle with St Matthias-on-the-Weir — is a former Church of England parish church on Bragg's Lane and Lamb Street in the St Jude's and Old Market areas of Bristol. Designed by the Bristol architect Samuel Burleigh Gabriel in the Decorated Gothic Revival style and consecrated in 1849, it was built to serve one of the most notorious slum districts of Victorian Bristol, the quarter once known as Poyntzpool. Designated a Grade II listed building in 1977 and closed as a place of worship in 1986, it stood vacant and deteriorating for nearly two decades before conversion into apartments in 2004–05 — but the district it civilised still bears its name.

The neighbourhood's history was colourful in the darkest sense. The land outside Lawford's Gate, known in the early eighteenth century as the Lamb Ground or Great Wells, was developed by Nathaniel Wade, who laid out Wade Street, Great George Street and Great Anne Street; by the mid-nineteenth century the area — associated with The Dings — had become a byword for squalor, crime and deprivation. Reports of 1848 called it "one of, if not the most squalid and abominable, quarters of the city", and the site chosen for the church had been a common ground used for "ruffianism", gambling and boxing matches. The area's older sports were bloodier still: the church rose on the site of the former "Bullring", near the thoroughfare colloquially known as Bull Paunch Lane, where bull-baiting had been held. The press hailed the project as the conversion of "a den of thieves into a house of prayer", intended to uplift a population of roughly 5,000, very few of whom could afford to contribute to the building costs — and early services were sometimes so disrupted by local disorder that barricades had to be erected around the church.

The ecclesiastical district of St Jude was constituted by Order in Council on 23 May 1844 under Sir Robert Peel's Endowments of Populous Parishes Act of 1843, carved from the massive, overpopulated out-parish of Trinity Saint Philip and Jacob, its boundaries running along Eugene Street, Little Ann Street, Wade Street, Brick Street and Bragg's Lane to the River Frome. Finding a site proved difficult until Colonel Masters, Lord of the Manor, donated the Poyntzpool land. Archdeacon Thorp laid the foundation stone on 16 August 1848, a brass plate engraved by a Mr Willett deposited in its cavity, and the church was built for about £2,979 plus £100 for the site — Bishop Monk of Gloucester and Bristol directing £1,130 from his Special Fund, with £280 from the Incorporated Church Building Society and £275 from the Parliamentary Commissioners. William Monks was the mason, G. Monk and Son the carpenters, and J. H. Hirst clerk of the works. Completed with 549 sittings — 343 for adults, 203 for children — St Jude's was consecrated on 31 October 1849 by the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol.

Gabriel's design, influenced by fourteenth-century parish churches, is of squared Pennant rubble with limestone dressings: a two-bay chancel, a low buttressed four-bay nave, and a three-stage west tower whose belfry stage has two-light windows with open reticulated tracery, crowned by an open parapet of "snaking tracery", gargoyles and tall crocketed pinnacles. The splayed west entrance is framed by three orders of shafts with foliate stops, and former school buildings adjoin the west end. Inside, the nave roof is open to the rafters on stone corbels carved with vine, ivy, maple and thorn; the polygonal chancel roof was originally wood-vaulted, its ceiling described at the consecration as richly coloured in blue and powdered with stars, and an oak screen with moulded tracery once crossed the chancel arch. A thorough renovation of 1884 under the architect E. Henry Edwards cleaned whitewash from the stonework, installed a wooden dado, altered the choir stalls and added extensive decoration — flowing conventional designs with scrolls reading Deus est caritas ("God is Love") in the nave and Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus in the chancel — with plain red and black tiles in the nave and Minton encaustic tiles in the chancel, and a five-light east window glazed with cathedral and Venetian glass, replaced in 1896 by A. F. Nott's stained glass of Christ the High Priest surrounded by the four Evangelists. The original font was a rich piece of Decorated work large enough for immersion; in 1895 a new font of white and coloured marble, sculpted like the reredos by Davey and Bushell, was installed as a memorial to the Reverend J. R. Graham, the gift of his widow.

The church's later history was eventful even by Bristol standards. On 7 July 1931 lightning struck the northern pinnacle of the tower during a severe storm, sending heavy masonry crashing into the road and damaging the aisle roof and houses on Lamb Street and Lawford Street. In 1960 parishioners helped install suspended heating to replace the coal-fired system, and the five-bedroom Victorian vicarage was demolished under a compulsory purchase order, replaced by a four-bedroom house in dull red brick adjoining the church's east end on a site historically known as The Piggeries, overseen by the long-serving vicar Father T. A. White — itself since demolished and redeveloped as student housing.

St Jude's was declared redundant in 1986, having held no service for nearly a decade. Proposals in 1982 for a martial arts group to take the premises came to nothing; an auction sale in August 1995 for £40,000 collapsed when the buyer failed to pay, and a re-auction that December fetched just £20,000 from a property developer. By 1999 the interior was in a poor state, though the pulpit and reredos remained, and between 2004 and 2005 the building became residential apartments. Its treasures were scattered with dignity: the organ, built in 1888 by W. G. Vowles of Bristol for St Matthias on the Weir and transferred to St Jude's around 1946, was bought in 1986 for £1,000 by St George's Anglican Church in Gawler, South Australia — on the recommendation of its organist Eric Strange, who had been a member and organist of St Jude's — while the 1920s sacrament house by Martin Travers went to St Anne's Church, Greenbank. The den of thieves became a house of prayer, and the house of prayer became homes; but the name of St Jude, patron of hopeless causes, remains fixed on the map of Bristol.