The Magnificent Mount St. Mary’s Church, Richmond Hill, Leeds: The Story of the Heroic Campaign to Save the Church 1987—2025
The dramatic story of the battle to save Mount St Mary’s Church, Richmond Hill, Leeds, the largest non-cathedral Catholic church in the country, will be told in a fascinating lecture at Leeds Minster by Leeds historian Dr Kevin Grady on Wednesday 26 February at 1.00 pm. It is a free public lecture. No booking is needed.
Dr Grady writes, “In the first half of the nineteenth century Richmond Hill or ‘The Bank’ on the edge of Leeds City Centre became home to thousands of Irish people who had fled the famine and their poverty-stricken lives in Ireland.
In 1851 the French religious order – The Oblates of Mary Immaculate – decided to build a church to serve the working-class Irish Catholics living in great poverty and in appalling housing conditions on The Bank. Mount St Mary’s Church, opened in 1857, served the Catholic community of Leeds for over a hundred years until it closed in 1989 to the great sorrow of its congregation.
When the church was threatened with closure in the late 1980s, the parishioners of Mount St Mary’s, supported by Leeds Civic Trust, fought a truly heroic campaign to prevent this church at the heart of their community from being closed and demolished.
Though the church was closed in 1989, with many twists and turns the campaign to save it from demolition continued for many years, but the church became derelict. Finally, at the end of 2024 Redwing Properties Ltd obtained planning permission for a highly imaginative scheme which will conserve a substantial part of the church for the future.
Much needed new housing is now being built retaining and renovating the historic Pugin-designed transepts, chancel and sanctuary of the church, while the demolished nave is to be replaced by a stylish modern apartment block which recreates the shape of the nave. Construction work on the site began in late 2024. While only half of the church will remain, it is the part designed by the great Victorian architect A W Pugin, and this will remain as a fine monument to history of the Irish-Catholic community of Richmond Hill.”
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