Church of the Sacred Heart, Hove

The Church of the Sacred Heart is a Roman Catholic church on Norton Road in Hove, part of the city of Brighton and Hove — the oldest of Hove's three Roman Catholic churches and one of eleven across the city, designated a Grade II listed building in 1999. Its story is a small parable of Catholic emancipation in England: from secret worship in a private house to a marble-shafted Gothic church where Eric Gill was received into the faith.

Roman Catholic worship was prohibited in Britain between the Reformation and the late eighteenth century, when Acts of Parliament began removing the restrictions; the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1791 allowed Catholic churches to be built for the first time. In neighbouring Brighton a community quickly established itself, building the permanent church of St John the Baptist in 1835, but Hove's Catholics took longer: by the 1830s they were meeting secretly in a chapel set up in a private house, with no thought yet of a permanent church. The first plans came in the 1870s, when Father George Oldham, formerly priest in charge of St Mary Magdalen's in Brighton, left money in his will for a mission church. He died in 1875, and the decision to establish Hove's first church followed in 1876. Finding a site proved troublesome. The original choice on Tisbury Road was abandoned for one opposite Hove Town Hall, bought for £3,746 — but while fundraising delayed construction, the West Brighton Estate Company, which owned the surrounding land and houses, complained about the supposed negative effect a Roman Catholic church would have on house prices. The company bought the land back and agreed to help find a new site; after Denmark Villas in the far north-east of Hove was considered and rejected, land on the west side of Norton Road was selected in October 1879.

The architect was John Crawley, a London-based ecclesiastical designer responsible for several churches in Sussex and Hampshire. His plans were approved in 1880 and the foundation stone laid on 3 November that year. Money allowed only part of the church to be built at first, but by its official opening on 28 September 1881 the Church of the Sacred Heart comprised a chancel, nave with north and south aisles, two side chapels and a presbytery. Crawley died just before the opening; his practice passed to Joseph S. Hansom — son of the inventor of the Hansom cab — who carried out the second phase in 1887, extending the nave at the west end to increase capacity, with the Reverend Charles Dawes as benefactor. The final phase came in 1914–15, when the north aisle was extended and a Lady chapel added on land bought in 1911 for £400; with its opening on 24 February 1915, the church was officially finished.

Crawley's design interprets Early English Gothic as it would have appeared in the fourteenth century, built of limestone with rock dressings beneath a roof of Welsh slate. The chancel ends in a three-sided apse and runs into the nave under the same continuous roof; the north aisle ends in the Lady chapel, whose five-light Perpendicular window is particularly large, while the south aisle holds a chapel dedicated to St Joseph, and the porch opens at the east end. Inside, the chancel and side chapels have vaulted side-shafts of marble and stone, the arches and walls are of brick, ashlar and stone mostly quarried in south-west England, and the nave roof is barrel-vaulted. The apse contains a large reredos; the pulpit carries carvings of Saints Peter and Paul, and the alabaster font is decorated with tracery. Nathaniel Westlake contributed many of the stained glass windows and some of the murals on the vaults — including his last work — and the local firm Cox & Barnard added a window in 2001, depicting St Francis in the centre light of the three-light west window.

The church's congregation has included memorable figures. The funeral of the Irish stage actor Barry Sullivan was held here in May 1891, and that of the flamboyant journalist George Augustus Sala in 1895; the composer Luigi Arditi worshipped here; and in 1913 the sculptor, artist and designer Eric Gill, having converted to Roman Catholicism, was received into the Church in this building. In the early twentieth century the parish planted a daughter church, St Peter's in Portland Road, Aldrington, completed in 1915 to serve west Hove and initially within Sacred Heart's parish before gaining its own.

Music has long been central to the Sacred Heart. The choir archives contain scores of Mozart and Haydn Masses printed around 1870, and one of the early Directors of Music in the 1890s was the then well-known composer Augustus Edmonds Tozer — compiler of the Complete Benediction Manual, Catholic Hymns, the Catholic Choralist and Modern Music for Church Choirs, and composer of the Mass of St Wilfred and the Mass of the Most Blessed Sacrament. The original three-manual Bevington organ was dismantled and removed in 1996–97, replaced by a two-manual, 41-stop instrument built by Copeman Hart and inaugurated in December 1998 in the presence of Andrew Reid, then assistant organist of Westminster Cathedral; it serves for recitals as well as Masses.

Today the church keeps a full liturgical round: three Sunday Masses with a Saturday evening Vigil, daily weekday Masses, three services on Holy Days of Obligation, and the Sacrament of Penance on Saturdays. The 9.30am Sunday Mass is a family service with contemporary worship music from the Sacred Heart Youth Choir, while the 11.30am Missa normativa is celebrated in English and Latin with Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony — the choir singing plainsong settings from the Kyriale including Cum Jubilo, Lux et Origo, de Angelis and Orbis Factor, with Mass settings by major composers on feast days. From a hidden house-chapel to sung Latin Mass on Norton Road, Hove's mother church of the Sacred Heart carries its emancipation story into a second century and a half.