Greek Orthodox Church of the Holy Trinity, Brighton

The Greek Orthodox Church of the Holy Trinity stands on Carlton Hill in Brighton — a Classical building of 1838 that spent most of its life as an Anglican church dedicated to St John the Evangelist, built as an act of charity in one of Brighton's most notorious slum districts, and reborn since 1985 as the permanent home of the city's Greek Orthodox community. It has been listed at Grade II since 1971.

Carlton Hill is a long, steep road on the high ground known as the East Cliff, north of the Kemp Town development and south of Hanover. As Brighton boomed in the early nineteenth century, the district became established as one of its most deprived slums — and it was for the people of such streets that Henry Michell Wagner, the formidable Vicar of Brighton from 1824 until his death in 1870, built churches. At a time when pew-rents were standard in Anglican churches, Wagner was committed to providing free churches for Brighton's poor, spending his large personal fortune on six churches in which most seats were free. The need was urgent: by 1830 about 18,000 poor people lived in the town — nearly half its population — but only 3,000 rent-free pews existed in all its churches combined.

St John the Evangelist was the third church of Wagner's campaign, after All Souls in Eastern Road (1833–34, demolished 1968) and Christ Church in Montpelier Road (1837–38, demolished 1982) — making the Carlton Hill church the senior survivor of the set. The architects and builders of Christ Church, the Brighton firm of Cheesman & Son, were employed again: George Cheesman Jr. designed it and his father George Cheesman built it, but where Christ Church had been Gothic, St John's was Classical. The foundation stone was laid on 15 October 1838; the church cost £4,660, including £908 for the site, and was consecrated on 28 January 1840 by Robert James Carr — a former Vicar of Brighton who had become Bishop of Worcester, visiting the town and standing in for the unwell Bishop of Chichester. More than half of the 1,200 seats were free.

The church never found congregations easy to attract. Its awkward location, the competing attractions of the district's cheap taverns and gin shops, and the controversial introduction of Ritualist, High Church worship in the 1860s and 1870s were all blamed, along with a long and expensive closure in 1879 for structural repairs. The Diocese of Chichester declared it redundant on 11 November 1980, and its future hung uncertain for five years — including a curious episode in June 1982, when one of four bidders for Brighton's new commercial radio franchise, a company called Southdown Radio supported by the actress Judy Cornwell, proposed converting the building into a broadcast studio. The bid lost to Southern Sound, and the church was spared for worship: on 13 December 1985 it was sold to Brighton's Greek Orthodox community, which has used it ever since, installing a new altar screen — the iconostasis — among other interior alterations, and registering it for worship under the Places of Worship Registration Act 1855.

Disaster struck on Sunday 4 July 2010, when fire spread from the ground floor into parts of the roof in the early afternoon. There were no casualties and no structural damage, but the entire interior was gutted, causing £500,000 of damage; the fire was treated as arson, with a £10,000 reward funded by public donations offered for the conviction of the arsonist. The congregation worshipped first in a marquee in the grounds of the fire-damaged building, then at St Michael and All Angels church, until restoration was complete and the Liturgy returned to Carlton Hill.

The building is of brick laid in Flemish bond with some stone dressings, its stuccoed southern frontage facing Carlton Hill — none of the other elevations is easily visible. The Georgian-style front, improved in 1957 by L. A. Mackintosh and once described as "strangely bleak," is divided into three parts by tall grey pilasters: a deep central recess flanked by two prominent forward wings, each with an entrance under a lintel of triglyphs and metopes, smaller white pilasters and a pediment. Above the west entrance is Mackintosh's crown monogram — his personal mark — and above the east, a monogram of an eagle, the symbol of John the Evangelist, the church's first patron. A large grey entablature with prominent triglyph-and-metope work runs above the three bays, and over the recessed centre rises another pediment embedded with a blue clock and topped by a cross; the large crucifix above the entrance is a recent addition.

Wagner's free church for the poor of Carlton Hill thus lives a second life: the evangelist's eagle still over one door, the Orthodox liturgy within, and the old slum hillside — long since rebuilt — still looking down to the sea past the church that was built for those who could not pay.