St Mary Magdalene's Church, St Leonards-on-Sea

St Mary Magdalene's Church is a Greek Orthodox place of worship commanding a prominent hilltop position overlooking Warrior Square in St Leonards-on-Sea, the seaside resort within the Borough of Hastings in East Sussex. Built in 1852 for Anglican worshippers in the growing planned town, its skyline presence was enhanced by the tower added in 1872, and when the Anglican community no longer needed it in the 1980s the building was quickly bought by the Greek Orthodox Church — which altered it so little that the "archaeologically correct Gothic" exterior and many original fittings survive intact. English Heritage listed it at Grade II on 14 September 1976.

The town it serves was one of the great speculations of the Regency coast. Hastings had been among Sussex's largest and most important towns since the twelfth century — site of the famous Battle of 1066, seat of a castle, home of its own mint, leader of the Cinque Ports, with seven churches inside its bounds — and as the old town recovered from its eighteenth-century slump and grew fashionable again, the surrounding land beckoned to developers. The manor of Gensing, a large and attractive sweep running from a forested valley down to flat farmland and beach immediately west of Hastings, belonged to the Eversfield baronets of Denne Park near Horsham. In February 1828 James Burton — the builder and entrepreneur whose son Decimus Burton became one of the age's great architects — bought a large section of it, including 1,151 yards of seafront, for £7,800, and laid out a carefully planned new town: St Leonards-on-Sea. Development of houses, shops and hotels was rapid, especially after an Act of Parliament incorporated the town in 1832, ending its life as Burton's private enterprise, and the resort soon rivalled Hastings itself. Burton gave the town its first Anglican church, the 800-capacity seafront St Leonard's, built in 1831 and consecrated in 1834, and after his death in 1837 the town kept growing, helped by the opening of St Leonards Warrior Square railway station in 1851 beside the great early-Victorian set piece of Warrior Square, which pushed the resort's edge toward Hastings.

By mid-century one Anglican church was not enough. A Roman Catholic place of worship had opened near Warrior Square in 1848, when Augustus Pugin's Convent of the Holy Child Jesus opened its chapel to the public, and in June 1850 a group of promoters applied to the Incorporated Church Building Society for funds for a new church to serve the eastern part of town. The name came ready-made: Burton's land straddled two ancient parishes, St Leonard's — named for one of Hastings' medieval churches, which had vanished by the early fifteenth century and had once belonged to an abbey in Rouen — and St Mary Magdalene's to the east, first described in 1656 and probably named from a medieval Hospital of St Mary Magdalene, for no ancient church of that dedication is known. The new church took the ancient parish's name. Charles Eversfield gave the site — high, conspicuous, overlooking Warrior Square — and funding came from the Bishop of Chichester, the vicar of St Leonard's and others. Sir Thomas Smith Marrable sat on the building committee, and his son Frederick was commissioned as architect. Work on the Decorated Gothic building began in 1852 and the church opened the same year, seating 822 worshippers split roughly equally between free and rented pews, at a cost of £12,000 — expensive for its time. The ecclesiastical parish was officially reconstituted in 1870.

Marrable's plans included a tower and a large spire. The spire was never built, but the tower rose at the south-west corner in 1872, in a year of improvements that also brought an apse-shaped organ chamber, a vestry and a new east window in the chancel. Stained glass by Morris & Co. followed in 1882, and a simple brick church hall was added on the north-west side in 1935. The church is an expensively designed, "archaeologically correct" Decorated Gothic Revival building, matching the typical style of a fourteenth-century church exactly as mid-Victorian architectural norms demanded — "large and imposing" on its high corner site, making a "handsome composition" in the townscape, and built, like so many local churches, of locally quarried sandstone laid in ashlar blocks inside and out. The plan comprises a clerestoried nave with five-bay aisles north and south behind arcades, a chancel at a lower level with a hammerbeam roof in the Perpendicular manner, a porch and vestry on the north side, and the buttressed four-stage tower rising from the westernmost bay of the south aisle, finished with a beacon-style turret and paired lancets on each face of its bell stage.

Ian Nairn and Nikolaus Pevsner, writing in 1965, found the interior "not specially interesting", but it keeps real treasures. The nineteenth-century stained glass — some destroyed in the bomb attacks of 1943 — included work by Marrable himself, Heaton, Butler and Bayne, William Miller, Clayton and Bell, Edward Burne-Jones and the Morris & Co. window in the south aisle; across the Atlantic, St George's Episcopal Memorial Church in the United States has a window containing shards collected from this church after its wartime damage. A three-seat sedilia and adjacent piscina with ogee-shaped heads remain in the south wall, along with a reredos carved with the Last Supper, an ogee-panelled porch and an octagonal carved font.

The Diocese of Chichester declared the church redundant in 1980, and soon afterwards — sources give 1981, 1982 or 1983 — the local Greek Orthodox community bought it, installing an iconostasis in 1983 as the central feature of their new church while leaving the Victorian building otherwise little altered. The church now belongs to the Hastings and St Leonards parish of the Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain, served by two priests, one of whom also serves the Greek Orthodox Church of St Panteleimon and St Theodore in Eastbourne, itself converted from a Calvinistic Independent Baptist chapel of 1857 — part of a regional pattern that also includes Brighton's Holy Trinity, converted from a redundant Anglican church in 1985. Licensed for worship under the Places of Worship Registration Act 1855 with registration number 79948, St Mary Magdalene's stands today as one of the most successful church conversions on the south coast: a Victorian Gothic landmark above Warrior Square, alive with the liturgy of the Orthodox East.