St Andrew's Church, Church Road, Hove

St Andrew's Church on Church Road in Hove — usually known as St Andrew's Old Church, to distinguish it from the later St Andrew's in Waterloo Street — is the ancient mother church of Hove, the seaside town that grew up alongside Brighton to form the modern city of Brighton and Hove. For several centuries it was Hove's parish church, and although it fell into near-ruin in the long years when Hove was no more than an isolated village, it was rescued and rebuilt in the 1830s as the town began its dramatic Victorian expansion. Its story is in many ways the story of Hove itself: medieval origins, centuries of decline, and a remarkable nineteenth-century revival.

Hove developed quite independently of neighbouring Brighton, beginning as a single straggling village along what is now Hove Street, running down to the sea. A church was established here in medieval times, perhaps around the twelfth century, on an isolated site in the fields to the north-east of the village, reached only from the west. The first building was replaced by a simple Norman church with an aisled nave and a tower, and by the thirteenth century a chancel had been added. This church served as the parish church of Hove until 1531, when the parish was united with that of Preston to the north-east, becoming the parish of Hove-cum-Preston. But the village's population dwindled, and with it the means to maintain the church: by the eighteenth century the nave and chancel were crumbling, parts of the roof had been removed, and in 1801 the tower itself collapsed. For a time the once-proud parish church stood as little more than a picturesque ruin in the fields.

The church's fortunes were transformed by the great wave of development that swept along the Sussex coast in the early nineteenth century. As fashionable Brighton expanded westwards it reached the boundary of Hove's parish, so that any further building had to take place on Hove land. The result was explosive growth: Hove's population, just 100 in 1801, rose to 2,500 by 1841 and to 11,000 by 1871, as the elegant Brunswick estate and other residential developments were laid out and the open land was systematically built over. The construction of the Brunswick estate began in 1824, and a new church — St Andrew's in Waterloo Street — was built in 1828 to serve its residents.

Not all the change was elegant, however. In 1825 the Brighton General Gas Light Company was formed, and in 1832 it built a gasworks on a two-acre site in the fields between Hove Street and the old church. The manufacture of coal gas was a notoriously smelly and dirty business, requiring vast quantities of coal delivered by horse and cart over unmade tracks, and producing coke, coal tar, sulphur and ammonia as by-products; the works, with its tall chimney and gasometers rising right beside the churchyard, was a considerable intrusion on the growing town. By 1861 the site had doubled in size and boasted five gasometers, and it was not until a large new works opened at Portslade in 1871 that gas manufacture was gradually moved away, the Hove site being used thereafter only for storage.

It was against this backdrop of rapid growth that the decision was taken to rebuild the ruined parish church. A meeting was held at a nearby public house on 14 September 1833 to propose its restoration, and the following week the parish voted — narrowly rejecting a proposal to demolish the old church and build a new one on a more accessible site. The architect George Basevi, one of the most distinguished architects of the day and the designer of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and of Belgrave Square in London, was asked to assess the cost; he quoted £1,870, and his father, a resident of the Brunswick estate, ultimately paid his fee. The parish borrowed £2,000, and rebuilding began in 1834, carried out by the London firm of Butler & Green to Basevi's design. The budget was tight, causing some friction during construction, and the overspend fell on the churchyard and its walls, which were not finished until 1837. The rebuilt St Andrew's was reopened on 18 July 1836, seating 430, and a west gallery adding a further 200 seats was installed in 1839.

The later nineteenth century brought further changes to the church's status. The vicar from 1834, the Reverend Walter Kelly, retired in 1878, when the united parish was split once more into the separate parishes of Hove and Preston, and St Andrew's once again became the parish church of Hove. But the new vicar, the Reverend Thomas Peacey, wished to build a grander parish church, and this was achieved in 1892 with the construction of the great All Saints Church; St Andrew's was thereafter reduced to a chapel of ease to All Saints, until it regained its own parish in 1957. The parish today covers the established residential area centred on the Hove Street and Church Road crossroads.

The churchyard, once a broad green space around the isolated church, has been reduced in size more than once over the years, with the loss of historic graves: in 1880 Church Road was widened, cutting ten feet from the southern side under a compulsory purchase, and in 1972 East Sussex County Council took much of the northern part to build a school, while the parish hall claimed another corner. Yet the church itself, Basevi's dignified rebuilding of 1834, survives at the heart of Hove.

St Andrew's stands on Church Road in the centre of Hove, a short distance from the seafront with its celebrated Regency squares and the long promenade and beach huts that are emblematic of the town. The Brunswick estate, one of the finest pieces of Regency town planning in England, the great Victorian church of All Saints, the shops and cafés of Church Road and George Street, the Hove Museum, and the wider attractions of Brighton and Hove all lie close at hand.

From a medieval parish church established perhaps in the twelfth century, through its long centuries of decline to a roofless ruin whose tower fell in 1801, and its rescue and rebuilding by George Basevi in 1834 amid the explosive growth of Victorian Hove, St Andrew's Old Church gathers the whole history of the town into one building. The ancient mother church of Hove, it remains a living Anglican parish church on Church Road — a quiet survivor of medieval Hove at the heart of the bustling modern town.