St John the Evangelist's Church, St Leonards-on-Sea

St John the Evangelist's Church is the Anglican parish church of the Upper St Leonards district of St Leonards-on-Sea, the elegant seaside town that forms part of Hastings in East Sussex. A "very impressive and beautifully detailed" Gothic Revival church with a landmark tower, it has a complicated and dramatic history — for the present building combines parts of a church of 1881 by Arthur Blomfield, wrecked during the Second World War, with a 1950s rebuilding by the distinguished architect Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel. A Grade II* listed building, rich in fine fittings, it is one of the most notable churches in the town.

The church owes its origin to a social need in the new town of St Leonards-on-Sea. The town had been founded as a fashionable resort by the builder James Burton in 1827, just west of the ancient port of Hastings, and it quickly became a smart residential area. Burton built a parish church on the seafront in 1831, and another, St Mary Magdalene's, opened in 1858; but both of these churches catered mainly for fashionable visitors and wealthier residents, charging pew rents for their seats. The town's many artisans, labourers, shopkeepers and working-class people — including the large workforce brought in to build Burton's new town — had nowhere of their own to worship, unless they made the long journey to the old Church in the Wood at Hollington, several miles away.

To meet this need, Lady St John — Louisa Boughton, the widow of a Baron St John of Bletso — paid for a third church to be built in the town, in which the sittings would be free, with no pew rents, so that the poor and working people could worship without charge. This was the origin of St John the Evangelist's. Two early churches were built on the site in the mid-nineteenth century — the second possibly designed by the noted Victorian architect Samuel Sanders Teulon — but both were destroyed. In 1881 a grander permanent church was built to the designs of Arthur Blomfield, one of the leading church architects of the day, giving the parish the impressive Gothic Revival building with its landmark tower.

Blomfield's church served the parish for over half a century, but it was badly wrecked during the Second World War, when St Leonards and Hastings suffered from enemy bombing. After the war the church was rebuilt and restored by Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel, one of the most original and learned architects of the mid-twentieth century, who combined the surviving parts of Blomfield's church with his own work to create the building seen today. Goodhart-Rendel also gave the church its rich internal fittings, including a complete scheme of stained glass by his favoured designer Joseph Ledger; among the church's treasures is also a sixteenth-century painting by the Italian master known as Ortolano Ferrarese.

Today St John the Evangelist's continues as an active Anglican parish church in the Diocese of Chichester, serving Upper St Leonards. Its dramatic history — from the free church built for the working people of the new town, through the work of Blomfield, the destruction of the war, and the rebuilding by Goodhart-Rendel — and its fine fittings make it a building of real architectural and historical interest, and its tower remains a landmark of the town.

The church stands in the Upper St Leonards area of St Leonards-on-Sea, the western part of Hastings on the East Sussex coast. The seafront, with James Burton's elegant Regency architecture, lies below, along with the old town of Hastings with its fishing quarter and castle, the site of the Battle of 1066 at Battle Abbey, the High Weald countryside, and the wider Sussex coast, with the cliffs of the Hastings Country Park within easy reach.

From the need for a free church for the working people of Burton's new town, through the early churches on the site, the building of Blomfield's church in 1881, its destruction in the Second World War and its rebuilding by Goodhart-Rendel in the 1950s, St John the Evangelist's Church gathers the history of St Leonards-on-Sea into one building. A Grade II* listed Gothic Revival church with a landmark tower, it remains the living parish church of Upper St Leonards — a building shaped by social conscience, war and the art of two distinguished architects.