St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church, Liverpool

St Peter's Roman Catholic Church on Seel Street, Liverpool, was until its closure the oldest Catholic church in the city: opened on 7 September 1788, served by Benedictine monks for nearly two centuries, deconsecrated in 1993, and famously reborn as the restaurant and bar Alma de Cuba, "the soul of Cuba", before reopening on 14 November 2024 as St Peter's Tavern. The Grade II listed building keeps within its later guises the memorial tablets, murals and the inscription "TU ES PETRUS" of its long Catholic life.

The church was founded amid the slow re-emergence of Catholic Liverpool from penal-era persecution. The first Catholic services in the city for over a century had been established in 1701 by the Jesuit Father Gillibrand, chaplain to the Squire of Crosby; the first chapel, built in Edmund Street in 1736, was demolished by a mob in 1746, and while a replacement was built disguised as a warehouse, Catholics met stealthily in a house in Dale Street, helped to slip in unobserved by two tolerant Presbyterian neighbours. In 1783 the St Mary's mission passed from the Jesuits to the Benedictines, and its first Benedictine, Fr Archibald Benedict McDonald, founded St Peter's in 1788, on a site then so rural that his superiors mildly complained it was too far out of town. The Liverpool Advertiser reported the opening high Mass "in a new Roman Catholic Chapel in Seel St.", the first baptism followed on 28 September, and in 1789 the City Corporation granted a perpetual lease of the site "so long as a place of worship", with the house and schools at an annual ground rent of twelve pence. McDonald served twenty-six years as "liberal, intelligent and revered pastor" until his death in 1814, when he was laid in the chapel vaults beneath the Founder's Monument.

The church grew with Catholic Liverpool. It was enlarged around 1817-18 with porch and gallery, the parish school opening in Seel Street in 1817 as successor to a smaller school of 1789 and reputed "the first Catholic school founded"; the major extension came in 1845, when the priests' house beside the church had its floors removed and the dividing wall taken down to create the present sanctuary, the church closing between the last Sunday of Pentecost and the Sunday before Christmas for the work, though even the date was long muddled in the parish records, variously given as 1843, 1845 and 1846. The priests of St Peter's paid dearly for their ministry among the poor: Fr William Tarleton died in 1816 of typhus caught consoling the sick; Fr Vincent Glover died of fever in 1840 after twenty-two years' service; and when hundreds of thousands of Irish famine refugees poured into Liverpool in 1846-47 and typhus engulfed the poorer quarters, with 57,701 cases reported by June 1847, Fr James Francis Appleton, who had overseen the great extension, died "a martyr of charity" on 26 May 1847, the Benedictine history drily recording that he had been recovering until, against doctor's orders, "he very injudiciously took some Whisky which acted like poison on his constitution." The Lady Chapel was built in 1864 in memory of Fr Benedict Bonney, Fr Scarisbrook was consecrated Bishop of Mauritius in the church in 1872, and the Lady Altar of 1898 marked Fr Anderson's golden jubilee as a Benedictine. Parish legend remembers Fr Basil Primavesi, parish priest from 1929, who, roused one night by a great fire threatening to cross Back Seel Street, came down, placed a medal of St Benedict on the church wall and went back to bed; the wind changed, and the fire engines did the rest.

The Blitz of 1940-41 nearly ended everything. Fr Louis D'Andria's letters to the Abbot of Ampleforth, published in 2000 as Coping With The Blitz, record doors blown in, holes in roof and Lady Chapel, a great stone fallen through the sanctuary skylight, and on the terrible night of 4 May 1941 the roof on fire and the registers carried into the road. "No Church, no congregation, no house, no school, no good staying here," announced the rector, Fr Bruno Dawson, and Mass moved temporarily to the Notre Dame Convent; the parish Guildhall on Park Lane was completely destroyed, seven of the priory's ten bedrooms were lost, and years of weary correspondence with builders and the War Damage Commission followed, Fr Dawson at one point throwing the workmen off site. Yet Masses resumed within weeks, three by the Feast of Corpus Christi 1941, and the parish, which had numbered 622 families and 2,823 souls at the 1934 census and had celebrated its 150th anniversary in 1938 with Archbishop Downey amid streets extravagantly decorated, soldiered on through the post-war decline of the inner city. In 1976 the church was transferred to the Polish community as Our Lady of Częstochowa, the parish closed in 1978, and the building was deconsecrated in 1993.

The twenty-first century brought an unusual resurrection. Urban Splash converted the building from 2003 with European, regional and private funding, and in January 2004 the developers made national news by discovering in the crypt the body of Fr Bede Brewer, one of the founders of Ampleforth College in 1802 and President of the English Benedictines. Twenty-two bodies lay in the crypt, eight monks and fourteen lay people: seven identifiable monks, Brewer among them, were reburied at Ampleforth Abbey in July 2004, but the founder Fr McDonald's unlabelled coffin could not be positively identified, and he was reburied with the lay people at Ford Cemetery in Litherland. The Alma de Cuba bar and restaurant opened in September 2005, required by the building's listing to preserve the memorial tablets and the murals flanking the great picture of St Peter behind the altar; the picture itself went to the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, where the church's marble and bronze seated St Peter, a small copy of the famous statue in St Peter's, Rome, now sits in the Crypt Chapel, while the statue of St Benedict went to St Begh's Priory in Whitehaven and the great pietà to St Mary's, Chorley. The pediment over the altar, whose inscription changed across the twentieth century from "I am the Good Shepherd" to "CHRIST THE KING" and finally to "TU ES PETRUS", still bears those words, "You are Peter", over the bar of St Peter's Tavern, reopened in 2024 by The 1936 Pub Company of Rob Gutmann, founder of Alma de Cuba — the strangest afterlife of the church the Benedictines built in the fields beyond Georgian Liverpool.