St Peter's Church, Fleetwood

Fleetwood is a planned town, which Decimus Burton laid out for Sir Peter Hesketh-Fleetwood between 1836 and 1843. The parish church, built from 1839 to 1841 to his designs, is an integral part of that plan and one of the town's first buildings.

Work began without a tower. In 1840 the money ran short, and Mrs Hesketh of Tulketh agreed to help pay on condition that a tower and spire were added. The spire was judged unsafe in 1904 and pulled down, and it was not replaced.

In 1883 the Lancaster architects Paley and Austin extended the church eastwards, adding the transepts, the chancel, a vestry and a chapel. The building has been listed at Grade II since 31 March 1978.

The church is built of sandstone, rock-faced on the nave and tower, with freestone dressings and slate roofs. Its plan is a nave with a west tower, transepts and a chancel, flanked by an organ chamber on the north and a chapel on the south, each with its own roof.

The nave and tower follow a simple Gothic of the early 1800s. The squat tower has two stages: diagonal buttresses brace the lower one, and in the upper one polygonal buttresses rise into corner turrets in its corbelled, embattled crown. The nave, divided into five narrow bays by gabled buttresses, is lit by tall pointed windows. The east end, later in date, is in a more developed Early English style, under steeper roofs.

Inside, the nave ceiling is polygonal with moulded ribs, and the transepts have open roofs. In 1994 a glazed screen was put in under the west gallery to set off a parish room at the west end of the nave. Ward & Hughes made the Te Deum east window and other early twentieth-century windows; the St Peter window in the south transept is by R.B. Edmundson & Son (1860). The organ of 1924, by Binns of Leeds, has three manuals and pedals and stands on the north side behind the choir stalls.

In 2008 the church stood in its own triangular grassed churchyard, and despite its reduced height, Burton's radiating streets kept its tower in view from much of that part of the town.

The church belongs to Fleetwood St Peter and St David, an Anglican parish of the Blackburn diocese, which holds services and weddings here. With St David's it forms "one church on two sites"; locally, St Peter's is known as "The Big Church". A choir sings here, accompanied by the organ.

The church stands in Albert Square, at the north end of Lord Street, in Fleetwood (FY7 6DX). The parish welcomes the public at its Sunday and weekday services.