St Andrew's Church, Waterloo Street, Hove

St Andrew's Church on Waterloo Street, in the Brunswick Town quarter of Hove, holds a notable place in English architectural history: its west front of 1827–28, by Charles Barry — the future architect of the Houses of Parliament — was the first use of the Italianate style on any church in England. Grade I listed, declared redundant in 1990 and now in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust, it was in its Victorian heyday one of the most fashionable places of worship on the south coast.

The land between Brighton and the ancient centre of Hove was farmland until the 1820s, when the architect Charles Busby planned and built Brunswick Town — a Regency estate of high-class houses with their own servants' quarters and services, answering the success of Kemp Town in Brighton. The population of Hove leapt from 100 in 1801 to 2,500 by 1841, but the new estate had no church: the ancient parish church of St Andrew's lay some distance off and had fallen into near-dereliction. The Rev Edward Everard, curate of St Margaret's in Brighton, owned land near the former Wick Farm and resolved to build a proprietary chapel there. He knew Busby well — but they had fallen out in 1824, when Everard had been overruled by the planning committee for the Sussex County Hospital and forced to break his promise that Busby would design it. So Everard turned instead to Charles Barry, who had built that hospital and St Peter's Church in Brighton; a blue plaque on the church commemorates him.

Construction began in April 1827, and an Act of Parliament of 3 April 1828 gave Everard and his successors ownership of the church, the right to appoint its curate for forty years, and two-thirds of the income from pew rents. Everard served as first curate from the consecration on 5 July 1828 until 1838, a year before his death. The chapel was an immediate success with the fashionable set, graced regularly by royalty and aristocracy — among them the elderly Prince Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, notorious for making loud and sometimes eccentric remarks during services. The 1851 religious census found 300 to 350 regular worshippers in a church of 420 pews, 340 of them rented.

Barry's exterior, facing west in brick and ashlar, sets the entrance beneath a round-arched opening between twin pilasters, with a small domed bell tower carrying clock faces (its bell of 1930 replaced an original inscribed 1811). The interior began as a plain, box-like preaching house — no chancel, simple pulpits, a single gallery — but grew steadily grander. Open benches replaced the seats in 1869, and in 1882 Barry's son Edward Middleton Barry extended the church at a cost of £7,000, adding a chancel, a sanctuary with Ionic columns, an illuminated dome and an organ space (the organ has gone, but its case remains). The 1920s brought a £4,000 campaign whose declared aim was to "create a little piece of Italy" within the Italianate shell: a pedimented baldacchino over the altar, a marble font with its own baldacchino, new stained glass set in clear Venetian glass, and enlargements to the altar case, joining the pulpit donated in 1918. The present interior comprises west gallery, nave, transepts, chancel, a south-east side chapel and north-east vestry, with Italianate top-lighting and domes; the top-lit narthex, with its stone stair to the gallery, now houses most of the church's memorial stones, moved there after redundancy, though five — including memorials to Lord Charles Somerset and Sir George Dallas, first Baronet — remain in the nave.

St Andrew's has one more distinction: it is the only church in Hove with burial vaults beneath it, built because the rapidly developing Brunswick Town had nowhere to bury its dead and the old churchyard was hard to reach. The first burial, in 1831, was Lord Charles Somerset MP, sometime Governor of the Cape Colony; a court order of 1854 ended the burials, and during the Second World War the vaults served as air-raid shelters.

Always unparished — formally a chapel of ease to St Andrew's in Church Road — the church declined through the twentieth century and was declared redundant on 14 February 1990. The diocese had once contemplated demolition, but the Grade I listing granted on 24 March 1950 made that impossible. Squatters damaged the building in the 1990s, but restoration in 2001–02, costing more than £100,000, reopened it for occasional services, special events and community activities; since September 2013 it has hosted the monthly gatherings of the Brighton and Hove Sunday Assembly. Barry's little piece of Italy on Waterloo Street remains one of the treasures of Regency Hove.