St John the Evangelist's Church, Chichester

St John the Evangelist's Church is a redundant Anglican church in the cathedral city of Chichester, West Sussex — an octagonal white-brick "evangelical preaching house" of 1812, designed by James Elmes, which preserves better than almost any building in England the worship ideals of the Church of England's evangelical wing before the High Church movements transformed Victorian church design. A Grade I listed building since 1950, it contains what has been called the best surviving three-decker pulpit in Sussex, and its theatre-like interior now makes it a popular concert venue in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust.

Chichester is an ancient settlement at the junction of Roman and medieval roads, its centre ringed by Roman walls and divided into quadrants by straight streets meeting at the market cross, with the cathedral making it a major ecclesiastical centre. Within the walls stood eight medieval or older parish churches, but the south-eastern quadrant — site of an ancient friary, mostly developed in the eighteenth century and known as New Town — had no Anglican church until the early nineteenth. The wave of church-building then sweeping Sussex was driven by urban growth, the challenge of Protestant Nonconformism, and new ideas linking styles of worship to styles of architecture; and while many new churches were funded by the government's Church Building Act or by diocesan and national societies, Sussex favoured a private alternative: the proprietary system. Individuals bought shares in a church and received in exchange a "sitting" — the right to own a pew — which they could use, sell or rent out, with admission fees sometimes charged to non-proprietors, the income supporting the curate and ministers, and a minority of free pews reserved for the local poor.

St John the Evangelist's was founded on exactly this model in 1812 by a group of trustees who wanted a church for the south-eastern quadrant. They commissioned the thirty-year-old James Elmes, who fell ill during the design and building, so the project was overseen by John Haviland — an architect at the start of a career that would later make him a prominent prison designer in the United States. The church cost £7,000, opened in 1813, and served the area for more than 160 years.

What makes the building nationally important is its uncompromising Low Church plan, conceived just as Anglican design was splitting along theological lines. The High Church movement demanded formality and ritual, centred worship on the Eucharist, and favoured Gothic Revival architecture, large altars and lavish decoration; the Low Church or Evangelical wing emphasised preaching, personal belief and an absence of ritual. St John's was designed to an "extreme Low church plan": an enormous central pulpit was the focus of the whole building, while the altar was so insignificant it "dwindled to a kind of kitchen table". The pulpit's height ensured the preacher could see every worshipper, and be seen and heard by all. The Sussex church historian David Beevers observed in 1989 that "the survival of this typical Georgian Low-church interior from the enthusiasts of the Cambridge Camden Society is surprising"; Ian Nairn called its survival a mystery. The "severely elegant" design is more reminiscent of a Nonconformist chapel than an Anglican church.

The elongated octagon is built of yellowish-white brick, partly stuccoed, with stone dressings, in a broadly Classical style with Greek Revival and even Egyptian Revival elements — the signature of a late Georgian "auditory church" built for preaching. Its most curious external feature is the cupola: a miniature copy of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, a stone cylinder with Corinthian-style columns carrying an entablature and spherical roof, variously described as "preposterous" and "excellent", and housing a bell cast in London in 1813 by Thomas Mears II of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. The west entrance sits beneath a stone entablature with pilastered doorcase, a round-arched window and pediment above, flanked by single-storey wings containing the staircases to the galleries; similar arched windows light each of the other seven walls.

Inside, the galleries — forming a rectangle on Egyptian-style iron columns — and the great pulpit that "towers over everything" represent, in the words of the listing authorities, "a unique survival" and a "superb example" of the late Georgian auditory style. The galleries are of American birch, reached by staircases with separate entrances — a characteristic of the era, when the sexes often sat apart, and at St John's the free ground-floor pews were kept separate from the proprietors' gallery pews. The free-standing pulpit, on a fluted stem with a spiral motif and also of American birch, is a three-decker — a refinement of the commoner two-decker, allowing different parts of the service to be read from different levels according to their importance: responses from the lowest deck, usually by the clerk; prayers and the main service from the middle; and the sermon — the heart of a Low Church service — from the circular upper deck. The three sections now stand side by side, though originally they were tiered one before another, and the pulpit hides the small chancel and sanctuary behind it.

The church passed in time to the Diocese of Chichester, but falling attendances led to its redundancy on 22 June 1973, and on 17 August 1976 it was transferred to the Redundant Churches Fund, now the Churches Conservation Trust — one of five former churches in West Sussex in the charity's care, with Church Norton, North Stoke, Tortington and Warminghurst. It remains consecrated and holds occasional services, and its strong musical tradition continues in regular concerts, especially during the annual Chichester Festivities — the Georgian preaching house finding, in its superb acoustics and theatre-like form, a second vocation that its evangelical founders might rather have approved of.