Church Of St Peter

Church of St Peter, Hackney

St Peter is a church built in 1840-1 by the London architect William Conrad Lochner (1779 or 1780-1861). The chancel was added in 1884 by Hugh Roumieu Gough, with an adjoining vicarage of the same period. The church is constructed of stock brick with limestone dressings and has slate roofs.

The building consists of a nave, a lower chancel, a west tower with vestibules on either side providing access to the galleries, a south-east organ chamber, north vestries, and a north-east staircase descending to an undercroft (formerly catacombs, now used as a parish hall).

The nave is large and wide, with six bays of exceptionally tall two-light windows uniform in design, each featuring a quatrefoiled circle in the head. The bays are divided by very shallow pilasters with an offset at the top. The vestibules flanking the tower, with north and south entrances above which are large single lancets, are characteristic of access arrangements to galleries in pre- and very early Victorian churches. The west tower contains the principal entrance, a doorway set beneath a gable, above which is a three-light Geometrical-style window with foiled circles in the head. Below the two-light belfry windows runs a row of blind arcading. A circular clock-face sits above the belfry windows. The tower is completed by a low embattled parapet set between octagonal pinnacles that form the terminations of polygonal buttresses to the angles. The chancel, added over 40 years later, is executed in a free round-arched style with three graded lights forming the east window. Polygonal buttresses at the corners are capped with freestone turrets of shafted corners with ribbed spirelets, more Gothic in appearance than Romanesque. A quarter-round stair on the north side of the chancel provides access to the undercroft.

Internally, the walls of the 1840-1 church are plastered and whitened, while those of the 1880s chancel are bare stone, reflecting the very different characters of the two phases. The galleries, supported on slender cast-iron columns with slender timber arcades above them featuring tracery in the spandrels, are an important survival from the original construction. The early Victorian work is generally Gothic and light in character, but the later work is executed in a much heavier neo-Romanesque style, with a large round moulded chancel arch having shafted responds of polished granite. The soffit of the chancel arch features a series of decorative fleurons (carved flowers). The nave roof has large tie-beams spanning the body of the nave and spaces over the galleries; over the galleries the roof is boarded, while over the nave the roof is pitched with struts rising from the tie-beams.

The most important fixtures from the 1840-1 period are the galleries themselves, which retain their original fronts with one-light trefoiled blind tracery. Most of the seating within them is original to this period and represents a relatively unusual survival. Later changes in taste led to renewal of the nave seating with pews featuring shaped ends. The neo-Norman style of the chancel is mirrored internally with round-arched arcading on the east wall framing paintings of Christ surrounded by the Apostles and figures of the Evangelists. A low stone screen and three steps mark the entrance to the chancel at its centre. The font is a characteristically muscular High Victorian piece, consisting of a circular bowl with a Norman zig-zag band and a circular base surrounded by four columns, suggestive of the Norman-Early English transitional period.

The former vicarage stands to the south-east of the church. It is a three-bay, symmetrical building in Tudor style with a projecting entrance porch and a gable over the centre of the middle bay.

William Conrad Lochner was a London-based architect whose main work was undertaken around Hackney and Enfield. He designed St Andrew, Enfield (1824) and St James, Enfield (1831). His office was at Albion Place, London Wall in 1836, and that same year he became one of the early members of the Institute of British Architects. Hugh Roumieu Gough (1842-1904), architect of the later phase, was a pupil of his father Arthur Dick Gough (of Gough and Roumieu) from 1862 to 1866. He served in the War Office surveyors' department from 1866-70 and was principal draughtsman at Woolwich Arsenal before commencing independent practice in 1870.

The church exemplifies the transition in Victorian ecclesiastical taste. Built in 1840-1 in what was then a conventional arrangement, it was soon superseded by the medievalising tendencies introduced by A W N Pugin and the Cambridge Camden Society. These new tastes manifested at St Peter's in the form of the new chancel (executed in a neo-Norman style) and reseating undertaken in the 1880s.