St Peter's Church, West Blatchington
| St Peter's, West Blatchington | |
|---|---|
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| 50°50′50″N 0°11′06″W / 50.8472°N 0.1851°WCoordinates: 50°50′50″N 0°11′06″W / 50.8472°N 0.1851°W | |
| Denomination | Church of England |
| Churchmanship | Modern Catholic/Anglo-Catholic |
| Website | St Peter's West Blatchington |
| Administration | |
| Parish | West Blatchington, St Peter |
| Deanery | Rural Deanery of Hove |
| Archdeaconry | Chichester |
| Diocese | Chichester |
| Province | Canterbury |
| Clergy | |
| Rector | Revd Daniel B Smith, B.Th (Oxon), DipMin |
St Peter's Church is an Anglican church in the West Blatchington area of Hove, part of the English city of Brighton and Hove. Although it has 11th- and 12th-century origins, the church was rebuilt from a ruined state in the late 19th century and extended substantially in the 1960s, and little trace remains of the ancient building. The church serves the parish of West Blatchington, a residential area in the north of Hove near the border with Brighton.
Like nearby Hangleton, West Blatchington started as an isolated village on the South Downs north of Hove, and had declined to such an extent by the 19th century that only the manor house, the church and some farm buildings and cottages were left. West Blatchington Windmill, near the church, had been built in 1820.
The parish church, St Peter's, was thought to have been built in the 12th century by the Normans. Archaeological work carried out in the 1980s, however, revealed 11th-century, Saxon origins. In particular, the flint walls which survive as part of the present building contain numerous pieces of Roman-era debris, such as fragments of broken tiles and stones from furnaces. These would have been gathered from the nearby Roman villa in the 11th century when the church was being built: Saxon reuse and recycling of Roman-era building materials and detritus was not unusual. (The Roman settlement, on a site occupied since the Bronze Age and also containing a few Neolithic artefacts, included ditches, rubbish pits, a cemetery, and kilns for drying corn.) Furthermore, the wall of the main doorway is much thinner than would be expected in a Norman church, and more closely resembles a Saxon wall; and two blocked-up windows high in the south wall are in the Saxon style—although there are also Norman windows elsewhere. It has also been determined that the original church was remodelled early in its life to include a chancel, to which the altar would have been moved. Saxon churches typically had altars in the centre of their rectangular structure; the Norman-era preference was for an altar at one end in a separate chancel.
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