Roman Catholic Church of St Peter

St Peter's Church is the Roman Catholic parish church of Scarborough, the historic seaside resort on the North Yorkshire coast. Built between 1856 and 1858 to the designs of the architect George Goldie in the Gothic Revival style, and Grade II listed, it stands on the corner of Castle Road and Tollergate in the town centre — the mother church of Catholic Scarborough, from which a whole family of daughter churches has grown to serve the Catholics of the town and its surrounding villages. Its story reaches back through the long centuries when Catholic worship had to be hidden, and it carries a tantalising near-miss with the greatest of all Gothic Revival architects.

Catholicism survived in Scarborough through the penal years after the Reformation in the quiet way it survived across much of England: the town's Catholics met in a house in the Westgate quarter, worshipping discreetly out of public view. With the gradual easing of the penal laws, a chapel was built on Auborough Street in 1809, and by 1835 the Catholic mission in Scarborough was served by a Father Walker. It was Father Walker who set in train the building of a proper church — and who came within a hair's breadth of securing a remarkable architect for it. In 1846 he invited Augustus Pugin, the supreme genius of the Gothic Revival, to come to Scarborough to design a new church. Pugin, however, never made the journey, and the commission passed instead to George Goldie, who would become one of the leading Catholic architects of his generation.

Goldie designed a church in the Gothic Revival style — though not without a small battle of taste, for Father Walker had at first wanted a church in the Norman Revival manner, and had to be persuaded by Goldie to accept the Gothic. The foundation stone was laid on 3 October 1856, and the church opened in 1858, although the interior was still unfinished; it was closed again in 1874 so that the interior could be completed, and reopened on 22 July of that year. The church was richly furnished over the following decades. Its organ was built by Forster & Andrews of Hull and later rebuilt by Nicholson & Co, and stained glass was installed in 1858, 1874 and 1898 — all of it by Hardman & Co of Birmingham, the firm founded to realise Pugin's own designs, so that something of the Pugin tradition reached Scarborough after all, in the windows if not in the walls.

As Scarborough's population grew through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, St Peter's became the parent of a string of new Catholic churches, each built as a chapel of ease to serve an expanding district. The first was St Edward the Confessor, to the south of the town: plans were laid in 1891 after Elizabeth Reynard of Sunderlandwick died leaving land and money for it, but the project stalled for twenty years until a Mr Anderson of York gave £1,000 to revive it. Its foundation stone was laid in 1912, and the church — an unusual essay in the Byzantine Revival style, designed by Father Eugene Roulin of Filey with the firm of John Petch & Son — opened in 1914. In the 1950s further growth brought St George's Church at Eastfield, built as a chapel of ease in 1957 for £15,000 and enlarged in 1965, and St Joseph's Church at Newby and Scalby, planned from 1930, served by a temporary building from 1949 and finally built in 1960 to the designs of the noted Yorkshire architect Francis Johnson — itself now a Grade II listed building. Together these churches trace the steady expansion of the Catholic community across twentieth-century Scarborough.

Today the Scarborough parish of St Peter incorporates St Edward the Confessor and St Joseph's at Newby and Scalby, while St George's at Eastfield is served from Bridlington — a network of churches sharing clergy in the modern way. St Peter's itself, in the Diocese of Middlesbrough, holds three Sunday Masses: the Vigil at 5.30pm on Saturday, a Mass in Polish at 9.30am, and the principal Sunday Mass at 11.30am — the Polish Mass a reminder of the diverse Catholic community the church now serves, as a Malayalam Mass once a month at St Edward's reflects the parish's Indian Catholic families. From hidden worship in a Westgate house, through a Georgian chapel and a Gothic Revival church that Pugin was meant to build, to a parish spreading across the whole resort and its villages, St Peter's has carried the Catholic faith in Scarborough for the better part of two centuries.

The church's setting is the old heart of one of England's first and most famous seaside resorts. Scarborough grew up beneath its great medieval castle on the headland between two bays, a spa town from the seventeenth century and a bustling Victorian resort reached by the railway, and St Peter's stands in the town centre below the castle, its Gothic tower among the spires of the old town. From its corner on Castle Road and Tollergate the church looks out over a town of harbour and cliffs, donkey rides and grand hotels — and continues, quietly and faithfully, as the mother church of Catholic Scarborough, its Hardman windows still glowing over a congregation drawn now from many nations.