page_title: Buildings and architecture of Brighton and Hove
section_title: Ecclesiastical architecture
hierarchical_section_title: Buildings and architecture of Brighton and Hove / Types / Ecclesiastical architecture
caption_attribution_description: Galeed Strict Baptist Chapel, Gloucester Road, Brighton, City of Brighton and Hove, England. A Gospel Standard Strict Baptist chapel dating from 1868.
context_page_description: Brighton and Hove, a city on the English Channel coast in southeast England, has a large and diverse stock of buildings "unrivalled architecturally" among the country's seaside resorts. The urban area, designated a city in 2000, is made up of the formerly separate towns of Brighton and Hove, nearby villages such as Portslade, Patcham and Rottingdean, and 20th-century estates such as Moulsecoomb and Mile Oak. The conurbation was first united in 1997 as a unitary authority and has a population of about 253,000. About half of the 20,430-acre geographical area is classed as built up.
  Brighton's transformation from medieval fishing village into spa town and pleasure resort, patronised by royalty and fashionable high society, coincided with the development of Regency architecture and the careers of three architects whose work came to characterise the 4-mile seafront.
context_section_description: Brighton's parish church, dedicated to St Nicholas, dates from the 14th century, St Andrew's Church at Hove is a century older, and the formerly outlying villages of Ovingdean, Hangleton, Rottingdean, West Blatchington and Portslade have even more ancient buildings at their heart.  Nevertheless, the defining characteristic of Brighton and Hove's religious architecture is the exceptional range of richly designed, landmark Victorian churches—particularly those built for the Anglican community. The city's stock of such churches is one of the best outside London: this is attributable to the influence of fashionable society and the money it brought, and to the efforts of two Vicars of Brighton, Henry Michell Wagner and his son Arthur, to endow and build new churches throughout Brighton's rapidly developing suburbs and poor districts.  Both men were rich and were willing to pay for well-designed, attractive and even flamboyant buildings by well-known architects such as Benjamin Ferrey, Richard Cromwell Carpenter and George Frederick Bodley.  An early preference for the Classical style, as at Christ Church (now demolished) and St John the Evangelist's at Carlton Hill, gave way to various forms of Gothic Revival design—principally in the starkly plain form of the gigantic St Bartholomew's Church and the even larger St Martin's, whose fixtures and furnishings are classed among the best in England. However, Charles Barry's imposingly sited St Paul's Church (1824), which began the Gothic trend, was not commissioned by the Wagners; nor were Hove's new parish church, the Grade I-listed All Saints (1889–91) or Cliftonville's St Barnabas' (1882–83), both by John Loughborough Pearson. St Michael and All Angels Church, built in two stages by Bodley (1858–61) and William Burges (1893–95), was established by Rev. Charles Beanlands, a curate under Arthur Wagner at St Paul's.  The two parts, in different interpretations of the Gothic Revival style, harmonise well, and the interior (mostly by W. H. Romaine-Walker) is one of the city's grandest. The present St Mary the Virgin Church is the second on the site: Amon Henry Wilds's Classical building collapsed during renovation and was replaced in 1877–79 by William Emerson's "dynamic" Early English/French Gothic design—his only church in England.
  Also characteristic of the Victorian era was the rebuilding or restoration of the area's ancient churches.  Richard Cromwell Carpenter rebuilt St Nicholas' Church from a ruined state in 1853–54, and Somers Clarke did more work in 1876. George Basevi carried out an "uninspiring" neo-Norman revamp of the 13th-century St Andrew's Church in the 1830s, James Woodman and Ewan Christian "over-restored" St Peter's Church at Preston Village in 1872 and 1878, and the 11th- and 12th-century St Peter's Church at West Blatchington was initially rebuilt by Somers Clarke in 1888–91 and comprehensively extended in 1960 in a complementary style by John Leopold Denman. The partly Saxon St Wulfran's Church, Ovingdean (the city's oldest building) was altered in the 1860s, although the overwhelming impression is that of a 12th-century Downland village church; and similar work was carried out at St Helen's Church in Hangleton in the 1870s, which nevertheless "retains its medieval character".
  Anglican churches continued to be built in the 20th century.  The stripped-down Modern Gothic of Edward Maufe's Bishop Hannington Memorial Church (1938–39), with its "simple and gracious interior", has been called "Historicism at its most simplified". The Gothic Revival style was also used for Edward Prioleau Warren's Church of the Good Shepherd (1921–22) and Lacy Ridge's St Matthias Church (1907), with its round tower and hammerbeam roof.  Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel's widely praised St Wilfrid's Church of 1932–34 (closed 1980), which embraced architectural Eclecticism and Rationalism, used two-tone brick and reinforced concrete and had an unusual interior layout designed to make the altar highly visible.  John Betjeman said it was "about the best 1930s church there is". Postwar churche
caption: The Galeed Strict Baptist Chapel is an austere three-bay Neoclassical building in North Laine.
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