St Mary the Virgin, Brighton

St Mary the Virgin is an Anglican church on St James's Street in the Kemptown area of Brighton, a Grade II* listed building of the late 1870s with one of the strangest origin stories of any Victorian church: it replaced a Greek temple of a church, of the same name, that suddenly and spectacularly collapsed while being renovated.

The first St Mary's belonged to the age of Brighton's Regency boom, when the town's popularity among high society encouraged wealthy men to build proprietary chapels — private churches with no parish but with an Anglican minister, authorised by Act of Parliament. The original St Mary's was one of four such chapels built in the 1820s. Barnard Gregory had obtained an Act in 1825 permitting him to build St Margaret's Church in Cannon Place and another chapel in St James's Street, the road running eastward from the town developed in the 1790s; in 1826 he sold the St James's Street right to Charles Elliott, a merchant dividing his time between London and Brighton. Elliott was a member of the Clapham Sect, the group of Anglican social reformers that included William Wilberforce; his daughter Charlotte Elliott became a well-known hymnwriter — author of "Just As I Am" — and the wider Elliott family shaped Brighton's religious life for much of the nineteenth century. The 3rd Earl of Egremont of Petworth House, who owned East Lodge with grounds running down to St James's Street, donated land for the church, and Gregory commissioned Amon Henry Wilds, the leading architect of Regency Brighton, who designed a Neoclassical temple based on the Ancient Greek Temple of Nemesis — a cousin of his earlier Brighton Unitarian Church, inspired by the Temple of Theseus in Athens.

The Act allowed the owner to appoint a curate for forty years on a stipend of £150 a year, and when Charles Elliott bought the half-finished building from Gregory in August 1826, he appointed his eldest son, Henry Venn Elliott, as first curate. The Bishop of Chichester, Robert James Carr, consecrated the church on 18 January 1827. It had cost about £10,000 — five times the contract price. The stuccoed exterior carried four large Doric columns beneath a frieze and pediment, the side walls had sash windows, and inside were galleries on three sides, one containing a private pew for the Earl of Egremont. Capacity was 947, with 240 free pews offered at a time when pew-rents were the norm — and helped pay the curate's stipend. Henry Venn Elliott served until his death in 1865, succeeded briefly by his brother-in-law and then by his own youngest son, Julius Marshall Elliott. In 1873 St Mary's became a parish church for the first time in the reorganisation of Brighton's parishes; ownership passed from the Elliotts to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and all pews became rent-free.

By then the building was dilapidated — and in June 1876, just as money had been set aside for reconstruction and initial repairs were underway, the chancel walls caved in, the roof fell inwards, and the church collapsed. Rather than repair the ruin, the parish decided to build anew in the Gothic style that had become the ruling fashion for English churches. The architect chosen was Sir William Emerson — a future President of the Royal Institute of British Architects who until then had worked almost exclusively in India, where he would later design the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta. While his building rose, the congregation worshipped in no less a venue than the Royal Pavilion. The foundation stone was laid on 29 May 1877; the church took two years and cost £15,231 — about a quarter more than expected — built by a Hove firm, and was dedicated by Richard Durnford, the new Bishop of Chichester, on 15 October 1878.

Emerson's design has been described as Early English Gothic Revival, Neo-Gothic and French Gothic Revival — most sources prefer the last. It is built of red brick in Flemish bond with external sandstone and terracotta dressings and Bath stonework inside. The plan comprises a chancel with pentagonal apse and ambulatory, transepts, an extremely long four-bay nave with aisles spanned by large arches, a semicircular baptistery, two entrance porches, an organ chamber and two vestries. A tower was planned beside the baptistery but never completed — only a stump exists, with one of the porches set into its base. The nave is on two levels, the higher forming the baptistery — a sunken-nave arrangement shared with St Martin's, another Brighton church of the 1870s. The apse and organ chamber have lancet windows, while the transepts carry larger windows with sexfoils.

St Mary's parish was extended in 1948 when nearby St James's Church closed; when St James's was demolished in 1975, some of its memorials and fixtures were moved to St Mary's. The church itself then faced the threat of closure after the Diocese of Chichester's 2002–03 review of Anglican churches in Brighton and Hove. The report of June 2003 noted that the building needed significant maintenance, that the relatively small congregation could not make the church financially viable, and that nearby St George's had become the de facto parish church of Kemptown; it recommended either complete closure or conversion of most of the building to a community project with Brighton and Hove City Council, retaining a small Anglican chapel. Yet no closure plans were ever submitted, and the church remains open with regular services — serving a parish bounded by the seafront, Old Steine, White Street, Sussex Street, the top of Queen's Park, Sutherland Road and Bedford Street, just behind the sea, where the Clapham Sect's chapel-temple once stood and Emerson's French Gothic vessel now sails on.