Roman Church Of St Peters

St Peter's Church in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, is a small Catholic church of outsized historical importance: the first new Catholic church built in Buckinghamshire since the Reformation, one of the last churches designed by Augustus Pugin, and the home of an extraordinary medieval relic — the Hand of St James the Apostle. Begun as a mission in 1844 and completed in 1846, designed by Pugin in the Gothic Revival style and founded by the local Member of Parliament Charles Scott-Murray, it stands between St Peter Street and Mill Road near the centre of Marlow, a Grade II listed building that embodies the rebirth of English Catholicism in the years around emancipation.

For nearly three centuries after the English Reformation, no new Catholic church was built in Buckinghamshire. Through the long penal years of recusancy the old faith survived only in private and in secret, and it was not until 1844 — fifteen years after the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829 had at last lifted the worst of the legal disabilities — that a Catholic mission was started in Marlow. Its founder and patron was Charles Scott-Murray, the Member of Parliament for Buckinghamshire and a convert to Catholicism. At Oxford he had come under the influence of John Henry Newman, the leading light of the Oxford Movement, and he was received into the Catholic Church while visiting Rome. Returning home, he endowed the Marlow mission with £2,000 so that a priest of his choosing could come to minister to the town's Catholics. At first the congregation was tiny: Mass was celebrated in premises on the site of the present church, attended by just three people.

Scott-Murray wanted more than a mission room; he wanted a proper church for the town, and he set about creating one. He gave the land on which the church now stands, and he consulted Nicholas Wiseman — then Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District, and later the first Archbishop of Westminster — about a suitable architect. Wiseman recommended Augustus Pugin, the supreme genius of the Gothic Revival, and Pugin went on to design the entire church, exterior and interior alike, with the windows made by Hardman & Co, the firm founded to realise his designs. Scott-Murray funded the construction, and Charles Chetwynd-Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury — Pugin's greatest patron — also took part in the work. The church was opened in 1846, seventeen years after Catholic emancipation and four years before the Catholic dioceses of England were restored in 1850, a building that stood at the very threshold of the Catholic revival. As one of the last churches Pugin designed before his early death in 1852, St Peter's, Marlow occupies a poignant place in his short and brilliant career.

The church's greatest treasure is a relic of the first rank: the Hand of St James the Apostle, the preserved left hand of St James the Greater, one of the twelve apostles and the patron of the great pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Such a relic, with its claim to physical connection to one of Christ's own apostles, is a rare and precious possession for any church, and its presence at Marlow gives this modest Buckinghamshire church a devotional significance far beyond its size — a focus of pilgrimage and prayer, and a tangible link to the age of the apostles in a church built to revive the ancient faith in England.

In 1970, with the Catholic congregation growing, the church needed more room — but it had been listed since 1949, and any extension had to respect the original character of Pugin's building. The solution, designed by the architect Francis Pollen, was an extension to the north-east, with its own chancel and altar, so placed that it cannot be seen from the street and does not disturb Pugin's original fittings and interior; it is reached through the Lady Chapel. The arrangement allowed the parish to grow while preserving intact the work of one of England's greatest architects — a model of how a historic church can be adapted to modern needs without sacrificing its heritage.

St Peter's has its own parish, which includes St Peter's Catholic Primary School on Prospect Road in Marlow, and it remains an active Roman Catholic church in the Diocese of Northampton, with three Masses each Sunday at 9am, 11am and 5.30pm. From a mission of three worshippers in 1844, through the patronage of a convert MP and the design of Augustus Pugin, to a thriving parish guarding the hand of an apostle, the church tells the story of English Catholicism's return from the shadows in miniature.

The setting is one of the most attractive of Thames-side towns. Marlow is a handsome Georgian market town on the Buckinghamshire bank of the River Thames, famous for its elegant suspension bridge of 1832 by William Tierney Clark, its riverside setting and its literary associations — Mary Shelley completed Frankenstein while living in the town, and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote here too. St Peter's stands near the centre of this prosperous town, a few steps from the river, its Pugin Gothic a quiet counterpoint to the larger Anglican parish church of All Saints by the bridge. From the first Catholic church in Buckinghamshire since the Reformation to a living parish with an apostle's relic at its heart, St Peter's, Marlow is a small but remarkable monument to the faith, the architecture and the history of nineteenth-century England.