This
little docklands church sits on a pretty,
tree-covered mound, in a wedge between Fore
Hamlet and Back Hamlet in the Ipswich docklands.
For the last couple of years, it has also found
itself on the edge of one of the largest building
sites in eastern England, as the massive
Waterfront regeneration gets underway. This
development can do nothing but good for Holy
Trinity, for it has been rebranded as one of the
Waterfront group of churches, and the acres of
derelict factories are being replaced by acres of
mid-rise apartment blocks. These parishes which
were almost empty ten years ago will soon be home
to thousands of people. The derelict Grimwade
Memorial Hall beside the church has been
converted into luxury studio apartments, and
given a new name, the GMH Building. The abandoned
electricity substation opposite is now Loch Fyne
at Mortimers, a classy fish restaurant. A
startlingly post-modern seven storey University
building has gone up on the opposite corner of
Duke Street. You could not have believed any of
this if you had been here in 1990.
One of the
down-sides to all this is that the elegant pencil
tower of Holy Trinity no longer dominates one
corner of the Wet Dock, as it had done since the
demolition of the ECF grain silo back in the
1980s. Now, it is just another tower among many,
as the east of England gets its own Salford
Quays-style development. The other side of the
church will also soon be built up, as the main
campus of University College Suffolk gets
underway.
At
first glance, you might wonder if this little
church will hold its own amongst the brave new
buildings of east-central Ipswich. After all, the
dirty yellow Woolpit-brick facade does not seem
particularly inviting to the historian. But this
church is worth a second look, because in 1836
this was the first Anglican parish church to be
built in Ipswich since the Reformation. It is
therefore one of Suffolk's very few Georgian
churches.
Holy
Trinity was built as a result of an Act of Parliament
that tried to respond to the needs of the new industrial
areas. However, the act didn't provide much money for
building, so the style is what was popularly known as
Carpenters' Gothic, with a local architect (Harvey) and
craftsmen keeping within a tight budget.
The big
mystery about Holy Trinity is why it was built here at
all. Cautley says it was a
chapel of ease to St Clement, in which parish
it was built. But I do not think this can be right, since
St Clement is only 100m away up Fore Street. The two
churches would have been less isolated from each other by
traffic in those days than they are today, and St Clement
would have been at the heart of the more densely
populated area. Perhaps, pre-restoration St Clement was
unusable? At a time of tight budgeting after the
Napoleonic war, it might have been easier to attract
funding for a new church in an industrial area than for
restoring the old one. Or perhaps it only became a chapel
of ease later. In any case, St Clement closed in the
1970s, and the other church in the parish, St Michael, in
the 1990s.
The church squats like a dirty seagull about
to take off. The workaday nave has been joined by a chancel, added in the
1890s to bring the church up to speed with liturgical
developments in the Church of England.
The interior of this church
is one of Ipswich's best kept secrets; it is
fabulous, and of outstanding interest, because
there is simply nothing else like it anywhere in
East Anglia. Pevsner calls the style of the
chancel Georgian Baroque, and it is a quite
remarkable feature. A sumptuous interior creates
a focus for the more functional nave, with its
prayer-book gallery and simple wooden benches. It
is a juxtaposition which is at once harmonious
and startling - you can see images below. perhaps
the best known feature of the church is the east
window, a memorial to the dead of World War I,
which was produced by a relation of the Vicar -
again, it is remarkable, with echoes of Powell
& Sons, but an idiosyncracy of its own.
There's nothing else quite like it. Given the
current emptiness of the parish, the fact that it
commemorates the lost boys is especially moving.
Back in 1999, when I first wrote
about this church, I asked the question: what
will happen to Holy Trinity? At the time, St Luke on Cliff
Lane was closer to almost all the housing in the
parish. The benefice now also includes St Helen,
at the heart of another populous area, albeit the
centre of Ipswich's large Bengali population.
Holy Trinity has neither the glamour of its
medieval neighbours or the practicalities of
Ipswich's modern churches, but it may well be
that the new population of the waterfront will
see Holy Trinity as its spiritual heart. Or,
perhaps it has a future ministering to the new
University. We shall see.
When I first visited Holy Trinity in
1996, the newsletter carried a poignant prayer
for 'The Lord to send us more people to be in our
congregation'. It rather appears as if those
prayers have been answered.
Simon
Knott 2006, revised and updated 2008
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