Introduction

At Bodley & Garner’s St Augustine’s, Pendlebury, the dominant architectural theme is structure, and the interior is one great space. Another church, the design of which goes even further as a celebration of one huge Sublime volume, is St Bartholomew’s, Brighton (1872–4), by Edmund Evan Scott for the Anglo-Catholic Arthur Wagner. When the latter’s father, H.M. Wagner, became Vicar of Brighton and West Blatchington in 1824 there were only the mediæval parish church of St Nicholas and a couple of proprietary chapels to minister to Anglicans: when A.D. Wagner died in 1902 there were 17 churches, 5 of which, lavishly fitted out for High Anglican worship, were paid for out of his own pocket. Of those five, shamefully, two (All Saints’ and St Anne’s) have been demolished.

Arthur Wagner imbibed his Ecclesiology at Cambridge in the 1840s: from the start of his career he was a convinced Ritualist. Fabulously rich through inherited wealth (the Wagners, originally from Germany, settled in London in 1717, and became hatters to both royalty and the British Army), his life was devoted to building churches for the care of all, especially the poor, in Brighton. He became vicar when a parish was assigned to Carpenter’s St Paul’s, in 1873. Wagner not only beautified St Paul’s, but financed the erection of other Brighton churches, including the Annunciation (begun 1864 to designs by William Dancy, with later work from 1881 by E.E. Scott, F.T. Cawthorn, and Martin Travers), the enormous St Bartholomew’s, and the magnificent St Martin’s (1874–5 – the first major work by Somers Clarke, with later fittings unsurpassed for their date).