St Nicholas' Church, Leicester

St Nicholas' Church, Leicester, is the oldest building in the city still in continuous use, an Anglo-Saxon church of more than 1,150 years' standing that rises beside the Roman Jewry Wall at the western edge of Leicester city centre. One of the five surviving medieval churches of Leicester Old Town and a Grade I listed building, it was raised, in all probability, as the minster of the ancient Anglo-Saxon bishops of Leicester, built almost entirely from the recycled bricks, tiles and stones of the ruined Roman city of Ratae Corieltauvorum on whose forum it stands. Today it serves as the official church of the University of Leicester and as the city's evening congregation, a Broad Church, modern Anglo-Catholic and progressive community and a prominent member of the Inclusive Church Network.

Few churches in Britain sit on a site so saturated in antiquity. The church stands at the heart of Roman Ratae, immediately east of the great bath complex whose entrance wall, the Jewry Wall, still towers over the churchyard; fragments of masonry from the forum's colonnade litter the ground around it. Antiquarians once imagined the site as a temple of Janus, a theory spun from the quantities of ancient animal bones dug up nearby, bones that gave the adjoining street its name of Holy Bones and the church its affectionate nickname. Modern archaeology suggests the church occupies a courtyard between two gymnasia of the baths, and that the abundance of ready building material, the prestige of the Roman remains and the central position drew the Anglo-Saxons to build here. Their thrift is still visible: the nave's fabric is wholly recycled Roman brick, tile, granite, limestone, sandstone and slate, and in the north wall of the Lady Chapel survives the beloved St Nicholas paw print tile, a Roman roof tile bearing the crisp footprint of a small dog that wandered across it while the clay was drying in the second century.

Leicester turned to Christianity after St Cedd's mission to the Middle Angles in 653 and St Chad's work among the Mercians from 669, and by 679 the borough had its own bishop, Cuthwine. St Nicholas was almost certainly the cathedral or minster of those ancient bishops, its nave's north wall probably built under one of Cuthwine's successors, perhaps even incorporating the Jewry Wall itself as a west front. The official listing and parish guide cautiously date the surviving double-bayed nave to 879, when the Danish invaders' records first attest a minster at Leicester, though the Victoria County History suggests any date from the 740s is reasonable. In 879 the Danes overwhelmed Leicester and the last ancient bishop, Ceobred, fled, his see migrating to Dorchester and at last to Lincoln. After Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, and Edward the Elder, children of Alfred the Great, retook the town in 918, the church grew: the lower stages of the present crossing tower and two transept chapels were added in the tenth century, transforming the basilica into a cruciform minster. The tower remains Leicestershire's finest pre-Conquest structure, its herringbone courses of Roman brick and rustic blind arcading unmistakably Saxon, with a Norman bell stage of the late eleventh or early twelfth century above. In or beside the church, the Jurats of the Moot of Burgesses, the governing committee of the ancient borough, held their meetings, and it is from these juries, not from any Jewish community, that the Jewry Wall is thought to take its curious name.

After the Norman Conquest the church became a parish in the Diocese of Lincoln, tiny in area at under sixteen acres but seated in the commercial heart of the town on the road to the West Gate, the bridge and the river port. The tower was completed and a spire, long since lost, raised in the eleventh century; in 1107 the parish was granted to the canons of St Mary de Castro and passed in 1143 to the new Leicester Abbey, which held it until the Dissolution. Around 1220 the dedication was changed to St Nicholas of Smyrna, patron of sailors, merchants and pawnbrokers, an apt choice beside the busy Soar port; a chronicle of Leicester Abbey suggests the church's original dedication may have been to St Augustine and St Columba. The thirteenth century gave the building most of its present plan: the Saxon apse was demolished for a new Early English chancel east of the tower, the south aisle was widened into a fine Lady Chapel with triple sedilia, priest's door and aumbry, and a chantry chapel rose north of the chancel, whose ghost survives as a blocked arch and exposed piscina on the outside wall. The late fifteenth century lifted the nave roof to its present height, inserted the clerestories and added the homely timber south porch, inside whose roof a small carved head still peers down at visitors entering through the Norman zigzag doorway beneath.

The Reformation struck the parish in successive waves: the dissolution of Leicester Abbey and the friaries in 1538 transferred the advowson to the Crown, which presented vicars until 1867; the Edwardian injunctions stripped wall paintings, statues and rood screens; the Chantry Acts ended the north chapel, which afterwards crumbled away. Civil War soldiers were billeted in the town, the churches were sacked, and after the siege of 1645 Prince Rupert's men pillaged the parish, though an old rumour insists that St Nicholas alone among the city's churches defied the rebel parliament and kept the Prayer Book liturgy through the Commonwealth. Harder than war was poverty. As Leicester's commerce drifted to the East Gates, the Western Ward sank into deprivation; the parish's population fell from a slender 120 in 1536 to 90 by 1700, the north aisle collapsed in the seventeenth century, broken windows were bricked up for want of money for glass, and the weakened tower lost its spire. Yet the parish has one unexpected claim on world history: in 1789 William Carey, minister of Leicester's Particular Baptists and the father of the modern Protestant missionary movement, lived in Thornton Street within St Nicholas parish, his house surviving as a museum until the road schemes of the mid-twentieth century swept it away.

The industrial age refilled the parish, from 947 people in 1801 to 1,925 by 1871, and the church changed to receive them. In the 1820s the Saxon south wall of the nave was demolished for a single wide brick arch, likened unkindly to a railway arch, to open the south aisle to the congregation; between 1875 and 1884 a thorough Victorian renovation rebuilt the long-lost north aisle and transept in pink granite, refaced the south aisle, and installed a ritualist reredos and high altar in the spirit of the Oxford Movement. The twentieth century completed the recovery: the tower restored in 1904-5, the Lady Chapel renewed in 1929 with the Atkins memorial window of the Presentation in the Temple, and in 1957 the ancient church was chosen, for its antiquity, as the ceremonial church and chaplaincy of the new University of Leicester, students riding a Sunday bus nicknamed the Holy Bones Express. Archbishop Michael Ramsey came on St Nicholas' Day 1970 to close the 750th anniversary celebrations of the rededication, and in 1975 a fifteenth-century octagonal font from the redundant St Michael the Greater, Stamford, was installed to make a baptistry on the old south transept site. The five south windows include the Wakeford memorials, one showing the Virgin, St Nicholas with his three nuggets of gold, and an angel, in memory of Elizabeth Wakeford, a London mathematics graduate who died young as a teacher of women in Hong Kong, the other commemorating her two sons killed in 1916. The organ of 1890 is by the local builder J. Porritt, and the three bells of 1617, 1656 and 1710, taken down in 1949, were rehung for stationary chiming in 2002, ringing out to welcome Queen Elizabeth II on her Golden Jubilee visit.

The present community wears its long history lightly. With its principal Sunday mass at 6.30 in the evening, St Nicholas serves as Leicester's evening congregation, drawing a predominantly young membership; pride flags hang prominently in a church whose mission embraces people of all sexualities, identities, disabilities and origins; and it claims the singular distinction of an Ornithologist in Residence, Alex Bond of the Natural History Museum at Tring. Eleven and a half centuries after Saxon masons stacked Roman bricks into its walls, the church on Holy Bones remains what it has always been: the oldest living room in Leicester.