Church of the Holy Trinity

Holy Trinity Church, Gosport, is a Church of England church in the Anglo-Catholic tradition within the Diocese of Portsmouth, serving as the civic church for the Gosport deanery and hosting the borough's commemorative events and the annual mayor's carol service. Standing on Trinity Green near the Gosport waterfront, with its tall Italianate campanile a landmark visible across Portsmouth Harbour, the church is most famous for a treasure inside: the Grade II* listed "Handel" organ, bought by the parishioners in 1747 from the estate of the first Duke of Chandos, an instrument believed to have been played by George Frideric Handel himself.

The church was consecrated in 1696 by Peter Mews, Bishop of Winchester, who had given the land. It was built as a chapel of ease to the ancient parish church of St Mary at Alverstoke, because Gosport was expanding fast and St Mary's could no longer accommodate the growing town. The bishop sent fourteen oak trees from his estate at Farnham Castle, carried to Gosport by ox and cart, to serve as pillars inside the new chapel, and the interior was finished in a graceful classical manner with Ionic colonnades, white walls and a barrel-vaulted ceiling. A handsome relic of the founding survives on the south wall: an ornately framed coat of arms presented to Bishop Mews in 1703 by the churchwardens William Mansfield and L. Andrews, quartering the keys and sword of St Peter and St Paul for the Diocese of Winchester with the bishop's own arms encircled by the ribbon of the Order of the Garter, an honour recognising his service to James II at the Battle of Sedgemoor. Holy Trinity remained a chapelry for over a century and a half, finally assigned its own parish in 1860.

Growth came quickly. In 1730 a gallery was built along the north side and a portico added to the west end to relieve the crowded seating, and in 1745 another sixty pews were squeezed in. A new west front was built in 1828-30 to the design of Thomas Ellis Owen, the architect-developer who shaped much of Victorian Southsea, and in 1867 Thomas Hellyer re-pewed the church, inserted a new altar and formed a chancel. The most dramatic transformation came in 1887, when Arthur Blomfield remodelled the building to mark Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. The exterior, previously stuccoed, was refaced entirely in red brick, the windows were re-formed, and a bellcote was raised over the east gable. Blomfield would have preferred to recast the interior in his favoured neo-Gothic, but the classical colonnades of 1696 made that impossible; instead he added an iron screen across the west end, removed the galleries, and installed a new altar. The result is the unusual fusion that defines Holy Trinity today, a Victorian basilican exterior wrapped around a classical interior ordered for Anglo-Catholic worship; Nikolaus Pevsner observed, not entirely kindly, that Blomfield had turned the plain old building with its low-pitched nave, tall steep-pitched aisles and apsidal chancel into a rather crude and simplified version of a Lombard basilica. In 1889 Blomfield added the campanile at the north-west corner, paid for by the Reverend William Luke Nichols, a Gosport-born antiquary who died that year while his bell tower was still rising; his tomb is the single grave left in place when the churchyard was cleared and levelled in 1962, planted with a thousand roses and a sweep of lawn to become Trinity Green, re-hallowed by John Phillips, Bishop of Portsmouth, after a service of thanksgiving.

From 1858, under Fr William Skipsey-Saunders, Holy Trinity came increasingly under the influence of the Oxford Movement, the reordering of chancel and altar reflecting a renewed emphasis on ritual and ceremony; the present high altar, oriented for eastward celebration, arrived in 1887, along with the reredos and statues of the saints. The church's high churchmanship deepened under Fr Henry Woolsey, vicar from 1912 to 1926, who had spent seventeen years as a master at Hurstpierpoint College, one of the Woodard schools founded to instil Anglo-Catholic belief in the Victorian middle classes. Though the parish had leaned Tractarian for half a century, Matins had remained the principal Sunday service; Woolsey replaced it with a Sung Mass, established a daily round of Matins, Mass and Evensong, popularised the practice of confession, introduced incense on Christmas Day 1913, and founded a monthly parish magazine to spread Anglo-Catholic teaching. His hope of introducing the reserved sacrament, still deeply controversial in the Church of England, was realised only after his death in post. Holy Trinity nevertheless remained within the moderate Prayer Book Catholicism strand of the movement, keeping vestments, bells and lights while holding the liturgy strictly to the Book of Common Prayer, and although the parish passed resolutions against the ordination of women between 1993 and 2014, it never affiliated to the traditionalist or liberal party societies, and since 2020 has accepted the ministry of women. Under Fr Ian Booth (2003-2006) the church was reordered once more, gaining a fourth altar in the centre of the nave for the celebration of Mass in the round.

The Handel organ remains the church's crowning glory. Handel served as composer in residence to the Duke of Chandos at Cannons in Middlesex, and on his advice the Duke engaged the esteemed London builder Abraham Jordan to construct a three-manual organ for the chapel there in 1720, an instrument Handel is said to have helped design and to have played, accompanying a choir of boys and men with chamber orchestra. When the Duke's heir sold off the Cannons estate in 1747, the parishioners of Holy Trinity bought the organ at auction for £117 and rebuilt it in their west gallery in 1748. It was moved to the east end in 1865, probably by William Hill, and rebuilt by Hill in 1897 with a new pneumatic action and additional stops, retaining the best of the Jordan pipework: four stops on the great organ and five on the choir are original 1720 work, making much of the instrument nearly three hundred years old. The oak case was painted white in 1971, the British Institute of Organ Studies awarded the organ its Grade II* certificate in 2006 as an instrument of importance to the national heritage, and a full restoration followed in 2012 after a major fundraising effort and a National Lottery Heritage Fund grant. It is still played for worship and regular recitals.

The interior rewards slow exploration. Above the choir vestry door is a polychrome maiolica lunette of an imagined meeting between St Francis and St Dominic, a reproduction of Andrea della Robbia's 1489 original at the Ospedale di San Paolo in Florence. The pulpit, in Italian Renaissance style, was designed by Blomfield and carved by Thomas Earp; the brass eagle lectern commemorates Edward Lewis Lucy Shewell, headmaster of Burney's Academy, lost at sea in a Mediterranean ship collision in 1887. The reredos above the high altar frames an eighteenth-century-style nativity painted around 1857-59 by the mysterious Charles Stephen Floyce, variously described as Florentine or Flemish, with the twelve apostles in its side panels; the local merchant Edwin Bishop brought it back from Italy and gave it to the church in 1892, and it was restored in 2000. The marble high altar itself has a poignant history: it came from St Agatha's, Landport, the great Anglo-Catholic mission church built in the Portsmouth slums by Father Robert Dolling in the 1890s, whose parish was devastated by wartime bombing; after St Agatha's closed in 1954, its altar was given to Holy Trinity and installed in 1955. The Jesus Chapel on the north side, dedicated in 1926 with oak panelling and a marble floor, holds a marble altar given by Fr Woolsey's sister Frances in 1931 and a wooden figure of Christ carved by Hems of Exeter in memory of the Woolsey family. The Lady Chapel on the south side, built with the choir vestry in 1928, has an oak altar carved with lilies for the Virgin and a unique Madonna and Child whose mould was destroyed after casting; it is dedicated to the memory of Canon Barclay, vicar from 1935 to 1967, while a hand-carved Italian statue of St Katharine with her spiked wheel remembers his wife Catherine, who died in 1965. A plaster copy of Donatello's St George from Orsanmichele in Florence was given around 1944 by the parishioner Ruby Pope in memory of her brothers, killed in the Second World War. Among the memorial plaques, the most affecting records the six children of Henry Needham Scrope Shrapnel, grandchildren of the inventor of the shrapnel shell, four of whom died within three months in the winter of 1843-44.

In recent years the parish has been reshaped. Under Fr Andy Davies (2007-2019) Holy Trinity formed a joint benefice with the broad-church Christ Church, and in 2020 the Diocese of Portsmouth merged them into a single parish with St John's Forton, placing the new parish briefly under the oversight of the rector of Harbour Church, Portsmouth, in the evangelical HTB network. Fr Godfrey Chigumira was appointed team vicar in July 2021 and Holy Trinity was established as a centre of excellence for Anglo-Catholic worship; after 2022 the Harbour Church link was dissolved under lead vicar Revd Ray Driscoll, and in 2023 the combined parish, embracing remarkable theological breadth, took the name Haven Church, from Gosport's civic motto, "God's port, our haven". Holy Trinity itself continues its traditional round of midweek and Sunday Masses, weekly Exposition and Benediction, Lenten Stations of the Cross, and a busy programme of concerts beneath the bishop's oak pillars of 1696.