Former Holy Trinity Church

Former Holy Trinity Church, Ship Street, Brighton

A Nonconformist chapel built in 1817 to the designs of Amon Wilds for Thomas Read Kemp. The building was consecrated as an Anglican chapel of ease in 1826 and considerably lengthened at that time. A chancel was added in 1869 in place of the former vestry. Substantial interior alterations and work to the south front were carried out in 1885-7 to the designs of George Somers Clarke junior and John Thomas Micklethwaite, with the latter's contribution dated 1886 on the fleche. The building is constructed in stucco with knapped flint and stone dressings; the roof is obscured by a parapet. The front to Ship Street is Gothic in style and executed in flint and stone.

The exterior features a single-storey narthex extending across most of the west front from the north, with three pointed-arched entrances with scroll- and roll-mouldings. The two northernmost entrances are set in architraves of pinnacled shafts and ogee hoodmoulds with crockets, and there is a chamfered corner. The narthex has a parapet of chequerwork. The upper part of the front is symmetrical, comprising three pointed-arched two-light windows separated by buttresses, with the centre window taller and set under a pointed arch slung between the buttresses. Low windows to either side have chequerwork parapets. At the centre, the parapet steps up to the first stage of a tower which converts, with splayed corners, from square to octagon. The octagon has pointed-arched windows in each face, each with two lights and one transom, an embattled openwork parapet, and a fleche.

The return in Duke Street is faced with stucco and is broadly symmetrical, though now altered. It extends for nine or ten windows over two storeys, with all but the two westernmost windows now blank and the easternmost partly cut off by the 1885-7 work. The front originally read as two slightly projecting sections of three-window range with two windows between them and one at either end, with openings grouped under a two-storey round-arched arcade. The ground floor is decorated with banded rustication. Two pointed-arched entrances of stone and one late twentieth-century flat-arched entrance have been inserted into the central bay. The windows in the projecting bays are linked by a springing band and archivolts. A cornice and panelled frieze are present, and the parapet steps up with additional cornice and blocking course over the projecting bays. A plaque on the west front records that between 1847 and 1853 the church was made famous by the radical preaching of the Reverend Frederick W Robertson.

The interior comprises a chancel of one bay with a five-light east window and a pair of north and south round-arched windows. The chancel floor is raised three steps above the nave and has oak panelling of 1924 stepped forward to form a reredos. A round chancel arch is supported by corbelled shafts. The nave extends for eight bays, rectangular in plan with galleries on three sides; the two easternmost bays are narrower than the rest. The galleries are carried on columns, probably dating from 1869, in a variation of the Composite order blending Renaissance, Gothic and neo-Grec details. The gallery fronts have raised and fielded panels and are perhaps original. An upper tier of gallery columns supports the roof, with cinquefoil triple lights at this level forming a clerestory. The chancel roof is panelled, boarded and barrel-vaulted. The nave roof, dating from 1885-7, is constructed of oak and composed of eight braced and strutted collar beams, each supporting a strutted king post. The webbing between the braces and struts is filled with pairs of turned balusters, and the ceiling areas between the struts are boarded and panelled. The two easternmost ceiling bays have a slightly lower pitch. Metal ventilating grilles are present in the central section of the roof. Rooms on two floors flank the chancel. Rooms flanking the nave are entered through four-centred arches from the nave and round arches from the gallery. A narrow narthex to the west end has sliding doors. A late nineteenth-century wooden pulpit is present, and a baptistery at the west end has been formed from two thick and closely-spaced tower buttresses, with a late nineteenth-century stone font. One mid-to-late nineteenth-century gas standard survives attached to the north gallery.