St Patrick's Church, Hove

The Brunswick Estate had been developed from 1824 onwards at the eastern edge of Hove, on the border with Brighton, on land originally belonging to Wick Farm. In 1851, the whole of the Wick Farm estate passed into the control of the Brunswick Square Commissioners. This land was rapidly developed as a residential area by Sir Isaac Goldsmid, 1st Baronet. St Andrew's Church in Waterloo Street, nominally the church of the Brunswick Estate, was a long way from this new housing and, being used mainly by the aristocratic classes, only had eighty pews which were not subject to pew rental fees. This made it unsuitable for the lower-class, poorer residents of the new development, so an Irish-born priest, Dr James O'Brien, decided to build another church in the area. As with several other churches in Brighton and Hove at that time, this was a proprietary chapel which he owned and ran himself, gaining an income from pew rents, marriage and funeral fees and various other sources. An Act of Parliament was normally needed before a proprietary chapel could be built, but none was granted in the case of this church. which was closed and declared redundant in 1990. It now covers the area between Holland Road, Lansdowne Road, the Brighton/Hove boundary and the seafront. The Revd Dr Steven Underdown was appointed Priest-in-Charge of St Patrick's in October 2009. He had been involved with parish during the 1980s and '90s and in 2002 had submitted a successful PhD thesis (Kings's College London) which was concerned in part with the life and worship of St Patrick's. ==Architecture==

Only the eastern side of the church is visible from the road. The architect was Henry Edward Kendall Jr. (1805–1855), who had designed the Sussex County Lunatic Asylum (later St Francis Hospital) in Haywards Heath and worked on the Knebworth estate inherited by the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Kendall adopted the Early English Gothic style and used Kentish ragstone with stone dressings and a slate roof. An octagonal tower was started but never completed, leaving a stump in one corner. The interior consists of a chancel, side chapels, an aisled nave and a narthex to the south. The chancel, which features stencilling and paintings from the 1890s, is topped by a hammerbeam roof, and the roof of the nave has gabled clerestory windows. An organ built by Henry Willis & Sons was installed in 1865, but was moved from one of the side chapels to the wall of the tower about 40 years later. William Butterfield designed the north window as a "memorial" to Dr O'Brien and his wife Octavia, who were still alive at the time (they both died in 1884, 14 years after the window was installed), another window on the northeastern side, and the lectern, cast in brass and featuring an eagle and St Patrick. This dates from 1873. and the church received the mocking nickname "Paddy's Music Hall". ==Monastic community==

In 1985, Dr Eric Kemp, the Bishop of Chichester, invited an Anglican monastic community, the Community of the Servants of the Will of God (CSWG), whose principal monastery was at Crawley Down, thirty miles north of Brighton & Hove, to be involved in St Patrick's, and in June 1985 six monks took up residence at 23 Cambridge Road, converting the house into a monastery. It took the name The Monastery of Christ the Saviour. However, owing to there only be around 12 monks in the order, the community was not large enough to support the project and they withdrew. ==Homeless Hostel==

St Patricks is now best known in the city for its partial conversion into a hostel for the homeless. The origins of this are from the winter of 1985 when the priest, Father Alan Sharpe, allowed two homeless people to sleep on the floor of the church after they went to the vicarage. This continued, and more homeless people were encouraged to stay overnight. In 1987 the narthex was converted into a dedicated night shelter and a charity was formed to raise money to develop the shelter further, in particular by redeveloping the interior of the church to dedicate more space to homeless people. The Lorica Trust was set up for this purpose; it consisted of three divisions, offering night shelter and hostel accommodation to homeless people; providing services to people with learning disabilities in East Sussex, West Sussex and Surrey; and operating church-based community projects and helping churches work together with their local communities. The shelter was extended to 12 beds in 1993 and 22 beds in 1999, when it moved to the northern part of the church. In 2008, Fr Sharpe resigned his ministry and quit as a director of the Lorica Trust after an undercover documentary team filmed him apparently giving a drug addict money to buy drugs, and alleged that this money had been taken from funds donated for the work of the Trust or from the church collection plates. Fr Sharpe always denied the allegations: "Everything I have done has been open, as a genuine, heartfelt Christian response to the needs of marginalised people." He remained in good standing with the Diocese of Chichester and was subsequently appointed Priest in Charge of Sedlescombe. The night shelter was closed in 2012 and the remaining hostel is now managed by Riverside, a registered provider of social housing in the UK. The hostel is no longer a drop-in service and only accepts referrals from Brighton and Hove Council's Rough Sleepers Street Services Team (RSSST). There is a minimum three-month stay and the average length of stay is 12–18 months. ==See also==