St Nicholas' Church, Durham

St Nicholas Church — known to everyone in Durham as "St Nics" — is a Church of England parish church standing on the Market Place at the heart of Durham, County Durham. Part of the open evangelical tradition of the Church of England, the Grade II listed Victorian building is the latest chapter in nine centuries of worship beside the city's market — and the church where a future Archbishop of Canterbury pioneered, in the 1970s, a vision of "the church in the marketplace" that reshaped its life.

The original St Nicholas' Church is thought to have been founded in the early twelfth century by Ranulf Flambard, Prince Bishop of Durham — the great builder-bishop who cleared Palace Green between the cathedral and his castle and established the present marketplace below, with the church of St Nicholas, patron saint of merchants, fittingly beside it. The first recorded vicar was Galfrid de Elemer in 1133. The medieval church had a buttressed nave and chancel and a square battlemented tower; its north wall formed part of the city walls, abutting the ancient Clayport Gate until that gate's demolition in 1791, with one graveyard between church and marketplace and another behind. Centuries of modification followed — the east end shortened to widen the road, a market piazza built against the south wall in the nineteenth century — and the building decayed: "very ruinous" in 1803, while Sir Stephen Glynne in 1825 found "a large structure, & displays some marks of antiquity, although the barbarous hand of innovation has swept nearly all before it", its windows "alas! of too sad a description to be mentioned" — though he allowed that it was "neatly pewed" with a "good Perpendicular" south porch.

In 1854 a competition to renovate the church was won by the twenty-four-year-old Darlington architect James Pigott Pritchett junior — but when the market piazza was demolished, the church was found to be beyond repair, and Pritchett was engaged to design a wholly new one. The incumbent, George Townshend Fox, gave an initial £1,000. The old church came down in June 1857; almost all that survives from it is the font of 1700 and the five bells of 1687 — the oldest ring of bells in the diocese — joined by a sixth in 1889. (Fears for the tower's safety silenced the bells from the 1970s, but ringing resumed in 2000 and the seventeenth-century bells now ring frequently.) Pritchett's new church, in the Decorated Gothic style and estimated at £3,600, opened with great ceremony in December 1858 and was hailed by the Illustrated London News as "the most beautiful specimen of church architecture in the north of England"; Pevsner considered it one of Pritchett's best. It was the first church in Durham to have a spire — not part of Pritchett's original plan, but added at the insistence of Fox, who paid the £400 himself.

The church's modern character was forged by George Carey, vicar from 1975 to 1982 and later Archbishop of Canterbury. Carey led a radical reordering, supervised by the ecclesiastical architect Ronald Sims, removing the pews and most of the Victorian interior features so the church could be used flexibly for worship and community activities — a process, and its impact on parish life, that he described in his book The Church in the Marketplace. One fruit of the reordered building was the Gateway World Shop in the south-east corner, with its own street entrance, selling fair trade goods — reflecting a deep involvement with the fair trade movement: Richard Adams, founder of Traidcraft, was a member of the church. The shop closed in February 2023, shortly after Traidcraft entered administration, as costs rose and fair trade goods became available in mainstream supermarkets.

The parish is small — covering only the area around the Market Place, Claypath and The Sands, bounded by Durham's three other ancient city parishes of St Giles', St Oswald's and St Margaret's — and was once densely populated, until 1920s slum clearance and commercial development emptied it; the church now draws most of its congregation, including many students, from outside its boundaries, and the Diocese of Durham classifies it as its own locality with a distinct mission. Its evangelical tradition runs long, with patronage held by the Church Pastoral Aid Society since the mid-nineteenth century, and its missionary record is striking: Alfred Tucker left his curacy at St Nics in the 1880s to bring Christianity to Uganda, becoming the first Bishop of Eastern Equatorial Africa, and the church still supports the Church Mission Society, the South American Missionary Society, the Bible Society, Spanish Outreach Ministries and the Diocese of Lesotho.

The clergy roll is remarkable for a single parish church: besides Carey and Tucker, it includes George Marchant, vicar 1954–74 and later Archdeacon of Auckland; the Biblical scholar John Wenham (vicar 1948–53); curates Pete Broadbent (later Bishop of Willesden), Alistair Magowan (later Bishop of Ludlow) and Frank White (later Bishop of Brixworth); David Day, former Principal of St John's College, Durham; Maeve Sherlock — Baroness Sherlock — curate from 2018 and Associate Minister from 2022; and Arun Arora, vicar 2017–2022, previously the Church of England's Director of Communications and subsequently Bishop of Kirkstall. Under Arora the church responded to the 2020 pandemic by moving online, producing Sunday morning and evening services and daily prayer — finding attendance at some online services higher than in person, and continuing to livestream thereafter. Nine hundred years after Flambard set the merchants' saint beside his new market, St Nics remains exactly what Carey named it: the church in the marketplace.