Pro-Cathedral of the Holy Apostles

The Pro-Cathedral of the Holy Apostles in Clifton, Bristol, was the Roman Catholic cathedral of the city from 1850 to 1973 — and one of the strangest cathedral stories in Britain: a grand Palladian temple that defeated its own foundations, lay as a roofless ruin for years, was rescued by a bishop's improvised carpentry, served as a "temporary" cathedral for 123 years, and now houses students. It was replaced in 1973 by the Cathedral Church of SS Peter and Paul, known as Clifton Cathedral, and the Grade II listed building survives on Park Place as a monument to Catholic Bristol's long road back from persecution.

That road was hard. Before the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1791, Catholics suffered systematic discrimination and could not hold public office; being a Catholic priest, while no longer high treason punishable by hanging, drawing and quartering, still carried life imprisonment, and in the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 an estimated thousand people died. By the time of Catholic emancipation in 1829, Bristol's Catholics worshipped in private houses or above a public house, and they had used a third party to buy, discreetly, a plot known as Stoney Fields on Honeypen Hill — now Park Place, Clifton.

Work on a church began in 1834 under Bishop Peter Augustine Baines, Vicar-Apostolic of the Western District, with Fr Edgeworth, parish priest of the Trenchard Street Chapel, laying the foundation stone. The design, by Henry E. Goodridge — the Bath architect Baines employed at Prior Park — was Georgian Palladian: a nave on an imposing basement storey of Bath stone ashlar, ringed by Corinthian three-quarter columns, with a Corinthian portico for the entrance and a circular lantern tower to light the sanctuary from above. But the hillside site was treacherous — the same kind of challenge Isambard Kingdom Brunel was wrestling with at the Clifton Suspension Bridge nearby — and the weight of the rising structure repeatedly broke its foundations. A second attempt at reinforcement in 1843 failed; Fr Edgeworth, personally responsible for the debts, fled bankrupt to Antwerp, where he died in 1850; Bishop Baines, burdened with restoring Prior Park after its 1836 fire, could not help; and the Newport Bank repossessed the ruin, which lay abandoned until 1848, mass being said meanwhile in the chapel of St Augustine lower down the hill.

The rescue came from Bishop William Ullathorne, appointed Vicar Apostolic of the Western District in 1846, who wanted a Bristol church that "might serve as a cathedral". Finding no other site, he repurchased what he frankly called "a useless ruin for many years, and a disgrace to the Catholic body" — walls without side windows, six huge half-raised columns, a span architects and builders declared impossible to roof. His solution, dictated to the architect Charles Hansom — brother of Joseph Hansom of cab fame, and later architect of Clifton College — was gloriously pragmatic. As Ullathorne recalled in 1868, he told Hansom to "put his architectural reputation into his pocket, and simply follow my directions": raise the walls two feet, then build two rows of columns not of stone but of wood, cased to look stouter, stepped onto two great beams run "like the keels of two ships" along the crown of the crypt vaulting, with wooden semi-circular arches above to carry an open timber roof. The "ingenious, comparatively lightly aisled structure of timber uprights and arches", compared to an upturned boat — familiar to Ullathorne from his naval childhood — converted the ruin into a usable church "at a small cost". It opened on 21 September 1848; in 1850, with the restoration of the English Catholic hierarchy, Clifton became an episcopal see and the church became the Pro-Cathedral — intended to serve only until a worthier cathedral could be built. Bishop Joseph Hendren became first Bishop of Clifton, while Ullathorne went on to be Bishop and later Archbishop of Birmingham.

Inside, twelve larger-than-life statues of the Apostles stood atop the plinths that covered and disguised the failed building's original stone columns, with statues of the Virgin Mary, the Sacred Heart, St John the Baptist, St Thérèse of Lisieux, St Anthony of Padua and St Rock among many others; by the rear door stood St Peter, his extended foot rubbed smooth by the touch of the faithful entering and leaving. In the 1870s Bishop William Clifford began replacing the unfinished portico with a schoolroom, and Charles Hansom — still living locally — remodelled the entire entrance front in a North Italian Romanesque style in Pennant rubble stone, the first phase complete by 1876, though the planned 200-foot tower with octagonal lantern and spire was never built. Round-topped windows added in the 1870s and 1903 brought light to the nave, with "rich Renaissance canopies" by Hardmans of Birmingham. In the Second World War part of the crypt was remodelled with blast walls as an air raid shelter, and the building came through the Bristol Blitz with only shrapnel damage to its slates.

The end came as the beginning had: through the ground. Though parishioners and clergy raised £250,000 between the 1930s and 1950s for decoration and restoration, civil engineers reported in 1964 that they could not vouch for the integrity of the ground beneath the building, and in 1967 the construction of a multi-storey car park in the former quarry below cracked the masonry, raising fears of foundation collapse — temporarily stabilised at the contractor's expense. Bishop Joseph Rudderham and the parish priest, Monsignor Thomas Hughes, faced the old dilemma: restore or rebuild. By late 1967 the decision was made, helped decisively by an anonymous group of business people who gave £450,000 on the strict condition that a new site be found and a new building constructed — donors with "a vision of a place of worship and a monument to Almighty God". The new Clifton Cathedral was begun at Clifton Park in March 1970 and consecrated on the patronal feast of SS Peter and Paul, 29 June 1973, and the Pro-Cathedral closed. Very little crossed the road with the congregation: two bronze bells of 1901 by John Taylor & Co., and a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century ivory carving of the crucified Christ, remounted as a processional cross — dropped and shattered in the 1990s, restored, and now retired to the wall of the new cathedral's Blessed Sacrament Chapel. The Victorian organ, an amalgam of three older instruments, would have cost £25,000 to move and was left behind; even the bishop's carved oak cathedra was auctioned off.

The site's afterlife has been varied. The diocese sold it to the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship — the proceeds funding the new SS Peter and Paul primary school in Redland, opened in 1974 — and a Steiner school occupied the building until 2002. In 2007 the Invisible Circus and Artspace Lifespace ran it as a theatre and arts venue (it had already had a brush with showbusiness, appearing in the 1985 filming of ITV's Robin of Sherwood), after which it fell into extensive disrepair. In May 2011 Student Castle bought the site and refurbished the Pro-Cathedral and its Upper School into student flats, later passing to Liberty Living and then Unite Students; today the building that was almost a Palladian basilica, then a ruin, then a cathedral, holds 263 student beds — Ullathorne's upturned boat still riding its uneasy hillside.