St Nicholas of Tolentino Church

St Nicholas of Tolentino is a Roman Catholic parish church at Lawford's Gate in Easton, Bristol, the oldest purpose-built Catholic church in the city and one of its most remarkable: founded in 1848 to serve impoverished Irish refugees fleeing the Great Famine, it has come full circle to serve a congregation of over fifty nationalities, and in 2018 became the first church in Bristol officially awarded Church of Sanctuary status for its work with asylum seekers and refugees.

The mission was established in March 1848 by Bishop William Bernard Ullathorne, who paid £1,000 for a site opposite Lawford's Gate Prison, in a district of extreme poverty then counted part of St Philip's or The Dings, crowded with Irish Catholic famine refugees who formed the majority of the first congregation. Worship began in a temporary chapel near Stapleton Road, the mission entrusted to the Augustinians under the Reverend Nicholas O'Donnell, and the church was fittingly named for the thirteenth-century Augustinian friar Nicholas of Tolentino. The nave, designed by the architect Charles Francis Hansom, opened on 21 December 1850, built for £1,600 in a thirteenth-century Gothic Revival style of Pennant stone rubble with Bath stone dressings, slate roofs and a spirelet at the southwest corner; its first bell, made by John Murphy of Dublin and installed in 1850, was paid for by the Portuguese Consul General, Chevalier Antonio Mascarenhas, who wished to encourage Irish manufacture. The Augustinians resigned the mission in 1852, after which diocesan clergy served the parish.

The young parish grew at speed. By 1861 the schools were overflowing with 110 girls and 85 boys, and the Reverend T. M. Hoskins drove an enlargement that added the north and south aisles, finished the rough-block arches and pillars of the nave, replaced the bell gable with an ornamental octagonal turret and added a porch toward the road; one new aisle was screened off on weekdays to serve as the boys' school. In 1873 Hansom returned under Septimus Canon Coxon, who had arrived the previous August, to add the chancel, Lady Chapel with its carved triangular window of three trefoiled circles, sacristy and presbytery, raising the church's capacity to about 700, with a three-arched stone sedilia and piscina in the chancel and an arcade of three moulded arches dividing chancel from Lady Chapel. Classroom blocks followed in 1879-80 by T. C. Hodges, partly funded when Coxon gave the entire gift presented for his sacerdotal silver jubilee toward a new classroom, and in 1910 by Scoles and Raymond; known as St Nicholas House, they served as the parish school until 1985 and were demolished in 2008. Because a Catholic church cannot be consecrated while in debt, consecration waited nearly fifty years until 10 September 1895, after Coxon's fundraising cleared more than £800: an elaborate ceremony in which relics of martyrs were sealed in the altar, ashes strewn on the floor in the form of a cross, and the Greek and Latin alphabets traced in the ashes by the bishop with his crozier. In thirty-four years as rector Coxon performed 1,654 baptisms and 290 marriages, and at his death in 1915 he left his vestments and furniture to the mission and a gift to the St Vincent de Paul Society for the parish poor. Canon Peter Murphy, an Irish-born priest who had been chaplain to the Convent of the Good Shepherd at Arno's Court, administered the parish from 1915 to 1935.

The church's social ministry, born in famine relief, has never ceased. In the early 1990s the Little Brothers of Nazareth ran a Sunday evening drop-in for the homeless here, known locally as "monks, punks and drunks", offering food and shelter on the one night when other shelters were closed, before moving to St James' Priory in 1993. In the twenty-first century the parish under Fr Richard McKay became famous for the defence of asylum seekers. During the 2004-05 case of the Rwandan genocide survivor Josette Ishimwe, McKay refused police entry to detain her, declaring himself prepared to go to prison to protect her; she was granted indefinite leave to remain in 2005. In 2008 the congregation sent some hundred faxes to the Home Office and airlines to halt the deportation of the Kamtcheu family to Cameroon, and in 2009 helped secure a High Court injunction less than an hour before a parishioner's scheduled removal to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The church staged the Actors for Human Rights play Asylum Dialogues in 2009 and co-hosted a major public inquiry into the destitution of refused asylum seekers attended by the leader of Bristol City Council; Fr Isidore Nnamdi Obi, a Nigerian who arrived in Bristol in 2006, credited the parish's support for migrants as the inspiration for his own priestly vocation. The parish runs a dedicated food bank, which after the COVID-19 pandemic reported a "total scandal" of poverty as savings were spent on food, and when fire broke out at the nearby Twinnell House tower block in September 2022, the church became a rest centre for some ninety evacuated residents.

The building has been reshaped to serve this ministry. After a 1960s porch addition, a £1.5 million remodelling by O'Leary Goss Architects between 2007 and 2009, shortlisted for an RIBA award, created a new main entrance at the east end, a two-storey church hall with mezzanine at the west end in the former organ space, three meeting rooms along the south aisle, a separate day chapel, and a new infill extension on Lawford's Gate with three Pennant stone gables reinterpreting the original street front. A full-immersion cruciform baptismal pool tiled in mosaic was installed in the nave, where the congregation now sits facing one another rather than the altar alone, beneath a tall open timber roof with scissor braces. The modern furnishings speak the parish's world-embracing character: specially commissioned wooden carvings from Malawi by the Missionaries of Africa, including a large statue of Christ with children carved from a single tree trunk, Stations of the Cross, and a sacrament house shaped like an African meeting hut. The Victorian font of 1861, carved with the Four Evangelists and the Dove, survives, as does the east window funded by the congregation before the 1895 consecration, which escaped the vandalism that smashed seven other windows in 1978; ceramic panels of St John the Baptist and St Nicholas by Seamus Malone marked the centenary in 1995, and a sixteen-foot hand-carved Peace Pole was installed at the entrance on World Peace Day 2012 with a multi-faith ceremony. Assessed by English Heritage in 2006 and found not to merit listing, the church is nonetheless recorded as an unlisted building of merit and added to the Bristol Local List in 2016 — though its truest distinction lies not in stone but in a hundred and seventy-five years of unbroken welcome to the city's poorest arrivals, from the famine Irish of 1848 to the refugees of today.