Minster Church of Saint John the Evangelist, Preston

Preston Minster — formally the Minster Church of St John the Evangelist — stands on Church Street in the centre of Preston, Lancashire, and has been the parish church of the town from its origin. An active Anglican church in the deanery of Preston, the archdeaconry of Lancaster and the Diocese of Blackburn, its benefice united with that of St George, Preston, it is a Grade II* listed building — and the bearer of a dedication that has changed three times across nine centuries of recorded history.

St John's occupies an ancient Christian site, originally dedicated to St Wilfrid — the seventh-century Northumbrian saint whose name is woven into Preston's identity, for "Preston" itself means "priest's town". The church is not specifically mentioned in the Domesday Book; the earliest documentary reference comes in 1094, when it formed part of a grant by Roger de Poitou to the abbey at Sées in Normandy. Nothing of that church survives. It was replaced, probably in the sixteenth century, by a new building whose dedication was changed in 1581 to St John the Baptist; repaired through the following century, it had deteriorated badly by 1770, when the dedication changed again — this time to St John the Evangelist. The tower was partly demolished in 1811 and replaced by a new one in 1814, but by 1853 the church was in such poor condition that the whole building, except the base of the tower, was pulled down.

The present church rose between 1853 and 1855 to the designs of E. H. Shellard, and is considered his major work. The distinguished Lancaster practice of the Paleys then furnished it across two generations: E. G. Paley designed a font in 1856 — probably adding the groining to the tower at the same time — a reredos in 1857–58, and the organ case in 1859; his son Henry Paley supervised general repairs in 1930, including new ceilings to nave, chancel and chapel at a cost of £802, and repairs to the tower and spire two years later for £320. The north and south galleries were removed in the 1960s, and the church was re-ordered in the early 2000s by Francis Roberts. In 2003, to mark the granting of city status to Preston, the church was renamed the Minster Church of St John.

Shellard's building is Decorated Gothic in sandstone ashlar under slate roofs, with a five-and-a-half-bay clerestoried nave, north and south aisles, a three-bay chancel with a two-bay organ-house to the north, a three-bay south chapel with attached vestry, and a west steeple with north porch. The buttressed tower rises in three stages, with diamond-shaped clock faces on its north and south sides, louvred bell openings under crocketed gablets, a gargoyled cornice, and a parapet whose corner pinnacles are linked by flying buttresses to smaller pinnacles clasping the tall octagonal spire, itself pierced by tiers of lucarnes. The two-storey gabled porch has a doorway flanked by crocketed niches. Along the clerestory, buttresses rise to pinnacles between paired two-light windows; the aisles carry large three-light windows between gableted buttresses, and the chancel ends in diagonal buttresses with pinnacles around a great five-light east window, the north parapet worked in open zig-zag.

Inside, quatrefoil piers carry the arcades of both nave and chancel, beneath hammerbeam roofs, with a timber-piered gallery at the west end. The altar, by Francis Roberts, incorporates the base of an older pulpit. The east end of the north aisle forms a regimental chapel, separated from the aisle by iron screens decorated with red roses, made by Trapp Forge in the later twentieth century. On the west wall hangs a large painting of the Sermon on the Mount, executed in 1956 by the émigré muralist Hans Feibusch, and the baptistry holds a painting of 2003 by George Melling. The glass spans the church's whole modern history: windows by William Wailes from the 1850s, a Shrigley and Hunt window of 1907 under the tower — and, most remarkably, a memorial window by Brian Clarke, commissioned by the Preston Guild to commemorate its 1972 Guild Year and as a tribute to Alderman Fred Gray. Designed in 1973–74 and installed late in 1974, the three-light window is notable for one of the earliest uses of silkscreen-printing onto mouth-blown glass — possibly its first expression in the United Kingdom — incorporating photographic passages including a street scene from the 1972 Preston Guild processions.

The memorials reach back to a brass of 1623, with monuments to members of the Hoghton family, the tomb-recess in the tower of Thomas Starkie Shuttleworth (died 1819), and a wall monument by J. Theakston to the Reverend Roger Carus Wilson (died 1839), carved with reliefs of the five Preston churches built during his incumbency. The three-manual organ of 1864 has been rebuilt repeatedly — by Gray and Davison in 1872, by William Hill and Son in 1889 (when it moved from the west gallery to the north of the chancel), by Hill, Norman & Beard in 1965, with Harrison & Harrison repairs in 1972 and a comprehensive rebuilding by David Wells in 1989.

The tower contains twelve bells, all cast by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry — but their story is transatlantic. The heaviest eight were cast in 1920 for Holy Trinity, Bolton, and transferred to Preston in 1997 with two added trebles; two further trebles followed in 2003. The original ring of six — cast by Thomas Mears II in 1814 and Mears & Stainbank in 1934 — was removed and later installed at Southminster Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where they now form a ring of eight, Preston's old voices still sounding across an American city. Outside, the churchyard gates of about 1855, probably designed by Shellard himself, are listed Grade II — the dignified threshold of the priest's town's mother church, minster of England's newest city since 2003.