St Michael's Church, Brighton

St Michael’s Church stands on Victoria Road in Brighton’s Montpelier district, a Grade I listed building built in the mid-19th century. It occupies the former Temple Fields site, once an open patch with a pond, chosen in the 1850s to serve the growing Regency terraces and crescents nearby. The church faces three streets and was designed by George Frederick Bodley, whose father had practised as a doctor in Hove. Bodley also worked on St Paul’s Church in West Street at the same time. The original building cost £6,728, took two years to complete and seated seven hundred worshippers. The church soon proved too small and was enlarged in 1893 by J. S. Chapple under plans drawn up decades earlier by William Burges. Burges had intended a cloister and a tower, but only the enlarged nave and aisles were built. Inside, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood helped decorate the chancel roof, with William Morris and his partners painting the panels. Morris also made the large western windows, while Bodley designed the marble font and pulpit. Stained glass by Morris and Burne-Jones fills many windows, and a Flemish triptych reredos was restored by Charles Eamer Kempe. Today the church remains an active Anglo-Catholic parish with daily Mass and a Sunday Sung Mass at 10.30 am. A Saturday breakfast meeting and parent-and-toddler group meet in the 1970s parish hall, built where the cloister was once planned. The surrounding streets still climb steeply from the seafront to Seven Dials, lined with Regency terraces and crescents. The building’s red brick and white stone bands show Bodley’s Italianate style, while Burges’s taller nave gives the interior a grander scale.