St Mark's Church, Brighton

Brighton's rapid growth in the early decades of the 19th century resulted in residential development filling in the gap on the cliffs between Thomas Read Kemp's high-class Kemp Town estate and the longer-established area around the Royal Pavilion and Old Steine, the centre of high society activity in the late 18th century. Roads such as Eastern Road and Bristol Road ran from west to east towards Kemp Town, and high-density housing branched off on roads to the north and south. This area became known as Kemptown . Kemp owned much of the land in the area, but in the 1820s he sold about 150 acre to Frederick Hervey, 1st Marquess of Bristol. He had succeeded to the Earldom of Bristol when his…

Prominent architectural historians have criticised St Mark's Church. Nikolaus Pevsner wrote of its "terrible stone facing", while Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel considered both St Mark's and the very similar Christ Church (now demolished) to have "deplorable architecture [...] combining the smugness of the chapel [with] the peculiarity of the Gothic". The building does not reflect ecclesiastical architectural norms of the mid-19th century, partly because its construction started several years earlier and also because Reverend Elliott and the Marquess of Bristol held traditionalist, old-fashioned views. The church was built in the Early English Gothic Revival style using a combination of…

St Mark's Church was listed at Grade II by English Heritage on 26 August 1999. It is one of 1,124 Grade II-listed buildings and structures, and 1,218 listed buildings of all grades, in the city of Brighton and Hove. St Mary's Hall School now owns the church. Reverend Henry Venn Elliott founded the school, which opened on 1 August 1836, and commissioned George Basevi to design it. He used the Early Tudor style, and the building cost £4,250 (£}} in ), over half of which was paid by Reverend Elliott. Many extensions have been built subsequently. The school made some internal alterations to the church to allow part of it to be used as an arts centre and concert hall, but its main function is…