St Peter's Church, Brighton

St Peter's Church stands prominently near the centre of Brighton, on an island site between the city's two main northern roads. Built between 1824 and 1828 to the designs of Sir Charles Barry, it is arguably the finest example of the pre-Victorian Gothic Revival style anywhere in England, and long the parish church of Brighton — so grand that it is often called, unofficially, "Brighton's cathedral". A Grade II* listed building, it is today a thriving evangelical church, one of the largest congregations in the city.

The church was founded as a chapel of ease to St Nicholas, Brighton's ancient parish church, to serve the rapidly growing town. The contract to design it was won in open competition by Charles Barry — then only in his mid-twenties, and decades before his great work on the Houses of Parliament. Built in an approximation of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Perpendicular style typical of the Commissioners' churches of the day, it was not, as Pevsner noted, a scholarly revival in the manner of Barry's near-contemporary Pugin, but it more than made up for this with its remarkable inventiveness and boldness. The foundation stone was laid by the Vicar of Brighton on 8 May 1824, at what was then the very entrance to the town, and the church was consecrated on 25 January 1828. A spire designed by Barry in 1841 was never built, and the original galleries in the side aisles were later removed in the wake of the liturgical changes brought by the Oxford Movement.

The most significant later change came at the east end. Barry's hexagonal apse was demolished in 1898 to make way for a much larger straight-ended chancel designed by Somers Clarke and J. T. Micklethwaite, built of warm Sussex sandstone that contrasts strikingly with the cold white Portland stone of the rest of the church. The work continued until 1906, and the new chancel was consecrated in the presence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson. The church contains fine stained glass, most of it by Charles Eamer Kempe — including a window commemorating Queen Victoria, given on behalf of the people of Brighton — and reredos panels by Edward Arthur Fellowes Prynne. The tower holds a ring of ten bells, cast in 1914, which rang out again in 2022 after restoration work on the tower, and once housed a large Henry Willis organ almost identical to that of Truro Cathedral.

St Peter's served as the parish church of Brighton from 1873 to 2007, but by the early twenty-first century its future was in doubt, and in 2007 it was recommended for redundancy. The church was saved in 2009 when Holy Trinity Brompton — the influential London church that created the Alpha course — agreed to take over its ownership and running as a church plant. Services restarted in November 2009 under the vicar Archie Coates, and the congregation has since grown to more than a thousand, with a strong focus on social action — including the Safehaven project for homeless people — and a lively programme of worship for families, students and young adults. St Peter's has itself planted further churches, including a satellite congregation on the Whitehawk estate and church plants in Hastings and Portsmouth.

A Grade II* listed building, St Peter's is one of the landmarks of Brighton, its pinnacled Gothic tower rising above the busy roads at the heart of the city. From its building by the young Charles Barry as a masterpiece of the early Gothic Revival, through its century and a half as Brighton's parish church and the rebuilding of its chancel, to its remarkable revival as a flourishing modern congregation, St Peter's Church remains both an architectural treasure and a vibrant centre of Christian life in the city — Brighton's cathedral in all but name.